GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO. - Poet, born in Pescara on 12 March 1863, died at Gardone (Lake Garda) on 1 March 1938.
His life often had a resonance that exceeded its intrinsic strength, and sometimes even his own will: at times shunning the vain clamour that swirled around him. Yet whether he courted public curiosity with gestures at once precious and daring, or cloaked himself in greater glory through solitude, he soon became—from his earliest youth and remained until his death—the instigator, more than the exponent, of a certain way of life (hedonistic aestheticism). Amidst panegyrics and indignation, he was sometimes reproached for what was not so much his own doing as that of his age, which was tormented by the urge to amass within itself every possible experience.
It is difficult to single out from his poetic work what belongs most exclusively to him: every trend in the literature of the late 19th century found him a participant, from the “barbaric” poetry of Carducci, in which he first tried his hand, to the intimism of the later crepuscular poets who nonetheless rejected the violence of his poetic gestures; from the naturalism of the second half of 19th-century Europe to decadence, from the vitalism of Whitman to the transcendental processes of Dostoevsky. He listened to every voice, wherever it reached him from in time or space. Nor can modern literature be properly understood without taking him into account, in all the directions in which his contemporaries moved: from Marcel Proust’s worldly epic to Sergei Yesenin’s imagism, from R. M. Rilke to T. S. Eliot, from Lorca’s theatre to Morgan’s novels.
A biographical chronicle may be briefly outlined in a few favoured places; and it must be borne in mind that the external data of places and years, in the life of a man who wished to be the architect of his own inimitable destiny, count for less than the transfiguration to which he subjected his memories. There is a period of childhood and youth, between Pescara and the Cicognini College in Prato, Tuscany, which he always revisited in memory; a Roman period from 1881, with long sojourns in Naples and in the Abruzzi; a Florentine period from 1897; then, from 1910, his “exile” in France, the war, and the “fiume adventure” (a trajectory alternating aestheticism and contemplation of death, offering a sacrifice of pain for the sufferings of a people at arms, and culminating in the grand adventure of political speech); and from 1921, Gardone, until his death. If he made of his life the substance for a poetic celebration, its influence on public taste was even more immediate; and passing from taste to political life, he was the first to set out along the path later taken by popular dictatorships, almost imposing through the violence of an artistic fascination the dialogue between the multitude and the “unique one”: a solution promoted by Stirner’s anarchism and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but exemplified by him after he had meditated it in novels (Le vergini delle rocce) and in theatrical figures (La gloria)—works which, for all their poetic truth, contained limits and portents that political taste would have to dare to surpass. Yet he also knew how to move beyond hedonistic aestheticism and vainglory.
His poetic production, which ranges from the “barbaric” vein of his early years to the intimism of the later crepuscular poets, from European naturalism to decadence, from Whitman’s American vitalism to Dostoevsky’s transcendental processes, and which listens to every voice from whatever quarter of time or space it may come, is difficult to reduce to a single essence. Nor can modern literature be properly understood without taking him into account, in all the directions in which his contemporaries moved: from Marcel Proust’s worldly epic to Sergei Yesenin’s imagism, from R. M. Rilke to T. S. Eliot, from Lorca’s theatre to Morgan’s novels.
A biographical chronicle may be briefly outlined in a few favoured places; and it must be borne in mind that the external data of places and years, in the life of a man who wished to be the architect of his own inimitable destiny, count for less than the transfiguration to which he subjected his memories. There is a period of childhood and youth, between Pescara and the Cicognini College in Prato, Tuscany, which he always revisited in memory; a Roman period from 1881, with long sojourns in Naples and in the Abruzzi; a Florentine period from 1897; then, from 1910, his “exile” in France, the war, and the “fiume adventure” (a trajectory alternating aestheticism and contemplation of death, offering a sacrifice of pain for the sufferings of a people at arms, and culminating in the grand adventure of political speech); and from 1921, Gardone, until his death. If he made of his life the substance for a poetic celebration, its influence on public taste was even more immediate; and passing from taste to political life, he was the first to set out along the path later taken by popular dictatorships, almost imposing through the violence of an artistic fascination the dialogue between the multitude and the “unique one”: a solution promoted by Stirner’s anarchism and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but exemplified by him after he had meditated it in novels (Le vergini delle rocce) and in theatrical figures (La gloria)—works which, for all their poetic truth, contained limits and portents that political taste would have to dare to surpass. Yet he also knew how to move beyond hedonistic aestheticism and vainglory.
His most intense and formally accomplished works are to be found in the *Laudi del cielo, del mare, della terra e degli eroi* (*Laus vitae*, *Elettra*, *Alcyone*, 1903; and *Merope*, 1912). And though the sheer volume of his writing, the presence of his myths in the words of his contemporaries, and the naïveté of a destiny accepted and expiated do not prevent—indeed, they heighten—the firmness of the condemnation that he himself, almost unconsciously, pronounces upon himself, dispersing himself “without faith and without fear... dust, not a shadow.”
D’ANNUNZIO AND THE CHURCH. — D’Annunzio’s literary production, so remote in its content from Christian ideology and ethics—both in the immanentist vision of life that inspires it and in the practice 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* [tragedies, comedies, mysteries, novels, short stories, poems] offensive to faith and morals; decree of 3 July 1935: A. Cocles, *Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto*; decree of 21 January 1939: *Solus ad solam*).
To follow in the footsteps of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, beyond and above good and evil, making the human spirit into an autonomous and tyrannical god that ultimately resolves into instinct (cf. *Cento e cento... pagine del libro segreto*, pp. 325, 351–52); to indulge in the representation of immorality, even the most brazen, with assertions of often impious and blasphemous errors (cf. *AAS*, 27 [1935], p. 304): these could only bring grave harm to the spiritual and moral formation of souls. In D’Annunzio’s works one finds episodes, figures, and sacred rites, but they are taken as creative pretexts and sometimes result in profanation and blasphemy; nor do they allow us to forget that persistent suppression, “with clenched teeth,” for fear of losing himself, of any rising impulse to pray 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.