CREPUSCULAR, POETRY. - The movement of the "crepuscolari" poets (the label was used for the first time by G. A. Borgese), besides immediate motives of an extrinsic and bookish nature, arose from inner needs. Incapable of germinating an original poetics, the crepuscolari derived their forms, for the most part, from the D'Annunzio of the Poema paradisiaco and from the French decadents. The derivation from Pascoli is debatable.
A sterile resignation, an ambiguous mysticism, a skeptical sentimentalism, within the framework of tenuous things and small bourgeois ideals, constitute the dominant note of this poetry, which may appear as the desolate liquidation of the great poetic season of the nineteenth 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, characterized by tuberculosis and by poetry, Corazzini, having moved beyond the experience of D'Annunzio, searched within himself and sometimes found a resigned and sorrowing poetry, with the charm of a subdued musicality. In F. M. Martini, on the other hand, the awareness of a crisis and the consequent need issued in the adventure of a journey to America, and then in multiform literary experiences. Guido Gozzano (v.) accentuates and unites in his poetic production the merits and defects of crepuscolarism, whose fundamental motifs are often diverted there by heterogeneous ambitions; in his last years he returned to the faith, there placating his dissatisfaction.
Negative, in general, from the ethical point of view, crepuscular poetry reveals itself as an art of transition, in which is implied the aspiration toward new forms and new ideals.
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Romano Romani