CREPUSCOLARE, POESIA. – The movement of the “crepuscular” poets (the term was first used by G. A. Borgese), besides immediate motives of an extrinsic and bookish nature, arose from inner needs. Unable to generate an original poetics, the crepuscular poets derived their forms, for the most part, from the D’Annunzio of Poema paradisiaco and from the French decadents. The derivation from Pascoli is debatable.
A sterile resignation, an ambiguous mysticism, a sceptical sentimentalism, within the framework of tenuous things and small bourgeois ideals, constitute the dominant note of this poetry, which may appear to be 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, marked by consumption and poetry, Corazzini, having moved beyond the experience of D’Annunzio, searched within himself and at times found a resigned and suffering poetry, possessing the charm of subdued musicality. In F. M. Martini, by contrast, awareness of a crisis and the consequent need led to the adventure of
a journey to America, and then to multifaceted literary experiences. GOZZANO, GUIDO (v.) accentuates and unites in his poetic production the merits and defects of crepuscularism, whose fundamental motifs are often diverted there by heterogeneous ambitions; in his final years he returned to the faith, finding solace for his dissatisfaction in II.
Negative in general from the ethical point of view, crepuscular poetry reveals itself as an art of transition, in which an aspiration toward new forms and new ideals is implicit.