D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE. - Poet, b. at Pescara on 12 March 1863, d. at Gardone (Lake Garda) on 1 March 1938.
His life often had a resonance that exceeded its intrinsic force, and sometimes his own will: shrinking, on certain occasions, from the vain clamor that surged around him. But whether he solicited people's curiosity with gestures now precious, now bold, or wrapped himself in solitude for greater glory, he soon became, from his earliest youth, and remained until his death, the promoter, more than the indicator, of a manner of life (a hedonizing aestheticism). Between panegyrics and indignation, he could sometimes be reproached for what was not so much his own as his age's, to which he was subject in the torment of accumulating within himself every experience.
It is difficult to choose from his poetic work what most belongs to him: he took part in every development of the literature of the late nineteenth century, from Carducci's "barbarian" poetry, in which he made his first attempts, to the intimism of the late crepuscular poets who nevertheless disowned the violence of his poetic enterprise, from the naturalism of the later European nineteenth century to decadentism, from Whitman's American vitalism to Dostoevsky's transcendental processes; and he listened to every voice, from whatever zone of time or space it reached him. Nor is modern literature comprehensible without keeping him in mind, in all the directions in which his contemporaries moved, from Marcel Proust's worldly epic to the imaginism of Sergei Yesenin, from R. M. Rilke to T. S. Eliot, from Lorca's theater to Morgan's novel.
The biographical chronicle can be summarily circumscribed to a few chosen places; and it must be borne in mind that the external data of places and years, in one who wished to be the artificer of his own "inimitable life," count for less than the transfiguration to which he subjected his memories. There is a period of infancy and boyhood, between Pescara and the Cicognini boarding school, at Prato in Tuscany, thereafter always revisited by memories; a Roman period, from 1881, with long stays in Naples and in the Abruzzi; a Florentine period, from 1897; then, from 1910, the "exile" in France, the war, the Fiume "exploit" (a line that alternates aestheticism and contemplation of death, attempts an offering of sorrow to the sufferings of a people in arms, and declines into the great adventure of the political word); and from 1921 Gardone, until his death. If he made of his life the substance for a poetic celebration, more ready was the efficacy he exercised on manners, and passing from manners to political life, he was the first who set out in the direction later taken by popular dictatorships, almost imposing by the violence of an artistic suggestion the colloquy of the multitude with the "unique one": a solution promoted by Stirner's anarchism and Nietzsche's supermanism, but exemplified by him, who had meditated it, in novelistic prose (Le Vergini delle rocce) and in theatrical figures (La gloria): works that, by the truth of their poetry, contained limits and presages that political custom was boldly to overstep. But he also knew how to proceed beyond hedonizing aestheticism and the va-
L'Alberello
O you, in the grey air, twisted and without
flowers, little tree of Segni-Paliano
that smiling beckon from afar
to our useless impatience.
now when will you bloom, livid naro,
if you do not then bloom in the presence
of her who encloses the divine essence
of every flower in her superhuman blood?
Well do I pity you. Already among the thick
silvery arrows of the cloud the Sun
languidly eyes the hills, like them.
And a whistle cleaves the air... Oh promises
of desire! Oh how within us there smokes
in the secret soul another sun!
Story 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).
political vainglory of egocentrism: attempting an offering of himself which, where it did not resolve into self-idolatry, persisted in an almost ascetic maceration (from the Contemplazione della Morte [1912] to the Cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di G. d'A. tentato di morire [1935]): the summit of this parabola is in the poetry of the Notturno (1916: published in 1921): the life which, resolved into word, sought itself in the shadow and, in the light, dissolved into dust. But he wrote «not for confession, but for revelation of himself»: and just as he sought out ascetic experiences and frequented the places of the mystics not in order to set out toward their goal, but to enrich his own human sense, so too in probing himself deeply he avoided every decisive metanoia, and avoided leaving the circle of a pantheism that continually recurred in his work as an «imaginifico».
His work will remain the projection of this parabola: from Cento novo and Terra vergine (1882), which gather together with the Carduccian experiences, exasperated into a panicky and naively barbaric sense of the earth, the attention of naturalism to the forms of primitive life, unmindful in primordial impulses, to the Piacere (1889), which is the most immediate document of his hedonism; from the Isotto and La chimera (1889) to the 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 is summed up in its most intense aspects and in a formal completeness more directly attained in the Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Lans vitae, Elettra, Alcyone, 1903; and Merope, 1912). And the fact of having written so much for clarity about himself, the very presence of his myths in the words of his contemporaries, the ingenuousness of his destiny, accepted and paid for, do not hinder — indeed they increase — the firmness of the judgment of condemnation that he himself, almost unknowingly, pronounces upon himself, dispersing himself «without faith and without fear... dust, not shadow».
Bibliography13 works
Mario Apollonio
THE D'A. AND THE CHURCH. - D'Annunzio's literary output, so far removed, in its content, from Christian ideology and ethics, both because of the thoroughly immanentist vision of life that inspires it and because of the practice it proclaims and defends, has been condemned by the Church (cf. Index libror. prohibit.: decr. 8 May 1911: Omnes fabulae amatoriae. Omnia opera dramatica. Prose scelte; decr. 27 June 1928: Reliqua opera (tragedie, commedie, misteri, romanzi, novelle, poesie) fidei et morum offensiva; decr. 3 July 1935: A. Coeles, Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto; decr. 21 Jan. 1939: Solus ad solam).
His setting out in the footsteps of Nietzsche's superman, beyond and above good and evil, making the human spirit into a kind of sanctimonious and tyrannical god, which in the end resolves itself into instinct (cf. Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto, pp. 325, 351-52); his indulgence in the depiction of immorality, even the most brazen, with the affirmation of errors often impious and blasphemous (cf. AAS, 27 [1935], p. 304), can only bring most grievous harm to the spiritual and moral formation and education of souls. In D'Annunzio's works there are episodes and figures and sacred rites; but they are taken up as a creative pretext and sometimes resolve themselves into profanation and blasphemy; and in any case they do not make one forget that day-long, "clenched-teeth" repression, for fear of losing himself, of some surfacing 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.
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