CREPUSCOLAR, POETRY. — The movement of the “crepuscolari” poets (the name was first used by G. A. BORGESE), besides immediate external and bookish motives, arose from inner exigencies. Incapable of germinating an original poetics, the crepuscolari mostly derived their forms from D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco and from the French decadents. The Pascolian derivation is debatable.
A barren resignation, an ambiguous mysticism, a sceptical sentimentalism, set against the backdrop of trifling things and petty bourgeois ideals, constitute the dominant note of this poetry, which may appear as the desolate liquidation of the great poetic season of the 19th century. Its most representative exponents were Sergio Corazzini (b. 1887, d. 1907), Fausto Maria Martini (b. 1886, d. 1931), Guido Gozzano (b. 1883, d. 1916), Aldo Palazzeschi (b. 1885), Corrado Govoni (b. 1884); Marino Moretti (b. 1885).
In his brief life, marked by illness and poetry, Corazzini, having overcome his D’Annunzian experience, delved into his inner self and sometimes found a resigned and sorrowful poetry, whose charm lay in its subdued musicality. In F. M. Martini, instead, the awareness of a crisis and the consequent exigency led him to the adventure of a journey to America, and then to multifarious literary experiences. GOZZANO, GUIDO (v.) accentuates and unites in his poetic production the virtues and defects of crepuscularism, whose fundamental motifs are often diverted by heterogeneous ambitions; in his later years he returned to faith, thereby appeasing his dissatisfaction.
Generally negative from an ethical standpoint, crepuscular poetry reveals itself as transitional art, in which there is an underlying aspiration for new forms and new ideals.