Hermeticism, Literary

HERMETICISM, LITERARY. - The term, at first used only to designate the Italian poetic movement roughly datable between the two wars, was later extended to designate a whole portion of militant Italian literature which, because of particular spiritual and technical affinities with Symbolism and especially French Surrealism, because of certain mystical and Platonizing veins, because of a certain difficulty of diction, because of analogical harshness and evocative indefiniteness, could be called "hermetic," and was willing to accept this term even though it came from those who opposed this movement and who in that sense wished to liquidate as obscure and devoid of concreteness the literature of the latest generations.

Despite polemical ferment and absolute descriptive novelty, Hermeticism could not fail to be a direct offspring of Italian Decadentism, if not of the most showy and Alexandrian kind (D'Annunzio, the Concilio, the Cronaca bizantina), certainly of the more inward kind, more desirous of human clarification (Pascoli above all). And the path of hermetic poetry, from the first "cries" of Ungaretti to Montale's Occasioni, from Quasimodo and Sinisgalli, from Luzi and Sereni, from Betocchi and Gatto, was a reasoned and profound rediscovery of a lyrical language ever more traditional in appearances, as it was newer in human and religious values in Ungaretti, in the anguished personality in Montale, in the social elegy in Quasimodo. And therefore the poetics of Hermeticism resides precisely in this anxiety to rediscover oneself, in the memory that through allusions and analogies seeks to overcome the opaque gulf of time and to reawaken lost sensations and images: and to rediscover the deepest reasons for its own existence.

Less rich in positive results, but no less culturally important, is, or has been, hermetic criticism, which (apart from the usual exaggerations of its satellites and epigones) sought to investigate, in ancient and modern poetry, no longer the historical datum, no longer the cultural setting, no longer the historicist discrimination between poetry and literature, but rather the intimate life of the poet within the poetry, the unconscious and most subtle adaptation of the writer to the myth of the poetic word. This brought with it, and it was the worst consequence, an abstruse, difficult, contorted critical writing: perhaps a legacy of a certain literary critical language of the journal La Voce. But, and this was the real gain for Italian culture, it served to introduce and make known the most advanced European literary production. Moreover, in the best hermetic critics (Carlo Bo, Oreste Macrì, Luciano Anceschi, Piero Bigongiari), it led them to a mature and perspicacious formulation and evaluation of contemporary Italian poetry.

Giorgio Petrocchi