D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE. — Poet, b. at Pescara on 12 March 1863, d. at Gardone (Lake Garda) on 1 March 1938.
His life often had an impact that exceeded its intrinsic force, and at times even his own will: on some occasions he was wary of the vain clamor that surged around him. But whether he stimulated people’s curiosity with gestures that were now precious, now audacious, or whether he crowned himself with solitude for greater glory, he soon became, from his earliest youth, and remained until his death, the promoter, rather than merely the indicator, of a way of life (hedonistic aestheticism). Amid panegyrics and indignation, he could sometimes be reproached for what belonged not so much to him as to his age, to which he was subject in the torment of accumulating every experience within himself.
It is difficult to choose, in his poetic work, what belongs to him most distinctly: every development in the literature of the late nineteenth century found him participating in it, from Carducci’s “barbarian” poetry, in which he made his first attempts, to the intimism of the late crepuscular poets, who nevertheless repudiated the violence of his poetic exploits; from the naturalism of the second half of the European nineteenth century to decadence; from Whitman’s American vitalism to the transcendental processes of Dostojevskij; and he listened to every voice, wherever in time or space it reached him. Nor is modern literature comprehensible without keeping him in view, in all the directions in which his contemporaries moved: from the worldly epic of Marcel Proust to the imaginism of Sergej Esenin, from R. M. Rilke to T. S. Eliot, from Lorca’s theatre to Morgan’s novel.
The biographical chronicle may be roughly confined to a few chosen places; and it must be borne in mind that the external facts of the places and years in the life of one who wished to be the artificer of his own “inimitable life” are less important than the transfiguration to which he subjected his memories. There was a period of childhood and early youth, between Pescara and the Cicognini boarding school at Prato in Tuscany, which his memories would later revisit continually; a Roman period, beginning in 1881, with long stays in Naples and in the land of the Abruzzi; a Florentine period, beginning in 1897; then, from 1910, the “exile” in France, the war, the Fiume “exploit” (a course alternating between aestheticism and contemplation of death, attempting to offer the suffering of a people in arms a gift of pain, and culminating in the great adventure of the political word); and, from 1921, Gardone, until his death. If he made his life the substance of a poetic celebration, more immediate was the effect he exercised on social customs; and, moving from custom into political life, he was the first to set out along the path later beaten by popular dictatorships, almost imposing, through the force of an artistic suggestion, the multitude’s dialogue with the “unique one”: a solution advanced by Stirner’s anarchism and Nietzsche’s supermanism, but exemplified by him, who had reflected upon it, in prose fiction (Le Vergini delle rocce) and in theatrical figures (La gloria): works which, by virtue of the truth of their poetry, contained limitations and premonitions that political custom would audaciously overstep. But he also knew how to move beyond hedonistic aestheticism and va-
The Little Tree
O you, in the gray air, twisted and without
flowers, little tree of Segni-Paliano,
smiling, you gesture from afar
at our futile impatience.
When will you flower, livid and black,
if you do not flower, then, in the presence
of her who encloses the divine essence
of every flower in superhuman blood?
I pity you. Already, among the dense
silver arrows of the cloud, the Sun
languidly peeps at the similar hills.
And a whistle cleaves the air... Oh promises
of desire! Oh how another sun
flames within our secret soul!
History of Segni-Paliano. — 2 April 1889.
(from L'Urbe, March 1889, p. 7)
D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE - Autograph of «L'alberello», Sonnet written at the station of Segni-Paliano (2 Apr. 1889).
in the political glory of egocentrism: attempting an offering of himself which, where it did not resolve itself into autolatry, persisted in an almost ascetic mortification (from Contemplazione della Morte [1912] to the Cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di G. d'A. tentato di morire [1935]): the culmination of this trajectory is found in the poetry of Notturno (1916: published in 1921): life which, resolved into words, sought itself in shadow and, in the light, dissolved into dust. But he wrote «not in confession, but in revelation of himself»: and just as he sought ascetic experiences and frequented the places of the mystics not in order to set out toward their goal, but to enrich his own human sensibility, so too, in probing himself deeply, he avoided every definitive metanoia, and avoided emerging from the circle of a pantheism that continually recurred in the work of his «imaginifico».
His work would remain a projection of this trajectory: from Cento novo and Terra vergine (1882), which, together with Carduccian experiences, heightened in a panicked and naively barbarous sense of the earth, gather naturalism’s attention to the forms of primitive life, oblivious in primordial impulses, to Piacere (1889), which is the most immediate document of his hedonism; from Isotto and La chimera (1889) to Poema paradisiaco (1893); from the novels (L'innocente, 1892; Il trionfo della morte, 1893; Le vergini delle rocce, 1893; Il fuoco, 1900; Forse che sì, forse che no, 1910) to the dramas (Sogno di un mattino di primavera, 1897; Sogno di un tramonto d'autunno, 1898; La città morta, 1898; La Gioconda, 1899; Francesca da Rimini, 1901; La figlia di Iorio, 1903; La fiaccola sotto il moggio, 1905; Più che l'amore, 1906; La
nuve, 1908; Fedra, 1909; Le martyre de st Sébastien, 1911; La Pisanelle ou la mort parfumée, 1903; and Le chèvrefonille, 1913); and it is summed up in its most intense aspects and in a more directly achieved formal completeness in the Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Lans vitae, Elettra, Alcyone, 1903; and Merope, 1912). And the fact that he wrote so much in order to make himself clear, the very presence of his myths in the words of his contemporaries, and the naivety of his destiny, accepted and paid for, do not prevent—indeed, they increase—the firmness of the judgment of condemnation that he himself, almost unconsciously, pronounces upon himself, dissipating himself «senza fede e senza tema... polvere, non ombra».
BIBLI: Opera omnia, national edition in 49 vols., Milan 1927–1937. Bibliographical guides: R. Forcella, D'A., 4 vols., Rome–Florence 1926–37; G. De Medici, Bibl. di G. D'A., Rome 1929; J. G. Fucilla and J. M. Carrière, D'A. abroad. A bibliographical essay, New York 1935–37; E. Falqui, Bibl. dannunziano, Florence 1941. Biographies and studies: B. Croce, G. D'A., in La lett. della nuova Italia, 3rd ed., IV, Bari 1929, pp. 7–70; A. Sodini, Ariel armato, 3rd ed., Milan 1931; G. A. Borgese, G. D'A., 2nd ed., there 1932; C. Antona Traversi, Vita di G. D'A., 2 vols., Florence 1934; T. Antongini, La vita segreta di G. D'A., Milan 1938; C. Bo, Ombra, non polvere, in Otto studi, Florence 1939; P. Barcellini, D'A., in Ritratto virile, Brescia 1939, pp. 199–227; B. Croce, L'ultimo D'A., in La lett. della nuova Italia, VI, Bari 1940, pp. 249–63; A. Gargiulo, G. D'A., 2nd ed., Florence 1941; G. Nicodemi, Testimonianze per la vita inimitabile di G. D'A., Milan 1943. Mario Apollonio
D'A. AND THE CHURCH. — D'A.'s literary production, so distant in its content from Christian ideology and ethics, both because of the markedly immanentist vision of life that inspires it and because of the praxis that it proclaims and defends, has been condemned by the Church (cf. Index libror. prohibit.: decree of 8 May 1911: Omnes fabulae amatoriae. Omnia opera dramatica. Prose scelte; decree of 27 June 1928: Reliqua opera (tragedie, commedie, misteri, romanzi, novelle, poesie) fidei et morum offensiva; decree of 3 July 1935: A. Coeles, Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto; decree of 21 January 1939: Solus ad solam).
The following in the footsteps of Nietzsche's superman, beyond and above good and evil, making of the human spirit something like a sanctimonious and tyrannical god, which ultimately resolves itself into instinct (cf. Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto, pp. 325, 351-52); the indulgence in portraying immorality, even in its most brazen forms, with the assertion of errors often impious and blasphemous (cf. AAS, 27 [1935], p. 304), can only inflict the gravest harm on the spiritual and moral formation and education of souls. In D'A.'s works there are episodes, figures, and sacred rites; but these are taken up as creative pretexts and at times result in profanation and blasphemy; in any case, they do not make one forget the prolonged repression, with “clenched teeth,” for fear of losing himself, of some emergence of prayer to Christ, the “most beautiful enemy” (cf. Contemplazione della morte, Rome 1939, p. 76). Cf. G. Busnelli, Sulla tomba di G. D'A., in Civ. Catt., 1938, II, pp. 193-209. Celestino Testore