ERMETISMO, LETTERARIO. – The term, initially used only to designate the Italian poetic movement that can approximately be situated between the two wars, was subsequently extended to indicate an entire section of militant Italian literature which, because of particular spiritual and technical affinities with French symbolism and surrealism above all, because of certain mystical and Platonizing tendencies, a certain difficulty of expression, analogical harshness and evocative indeterminacy, could be called “hermetic,” and willingly accepted this term, even though it came from those who opposed the movement and wished in this sense to dismiss the literature of the latest generations as obscure and lacking in concreteness.
Despite polemical ferment and absolute descriptive novelty, e. could not fail to be a direct offspring of Italian decadence, if not of its more conspicuous and Alexandrian form (D'Annunzio, the Concilio, the Cronaca bizantina), certainly of its more inward form, more desirous of human clarification (Pascoli above all). And the course of hermetic poetry, from Ungaretti’s first “cries” to Montale’s Occasioni, from Quasimodo and Sinisgalli, from Luzì and Sereni, from Betocchi and Gatto, has been a reasoned and profound rediscovery of a lyrical language increasingly traditional in appearance, yet newer in its human and religious values in Ungaretti, in its anguished personality in Montale, and in its social elegy in Quasimodo. Thus the poetics of e. lies precisely in this longing to rediscover itself, in the memory that, through allusions and analogies, seeks to overcome the opaque gulf of time and awaken lost sensations and images: and to recover the deepest reasons for its own existence.
Less rich in positive results, but no less im-
portant culturally, is—or was—hermetic criticism, which (apart from the usual exaggerations of its satellites and epigones) sought 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 poet’s intimate life within poetry, the unconscious and most subtle adaptation of the writer to the myth of the poetic word. This brought with it, and was its worst consequence, an abstruse, difficult, contracted critical prose: perhaps the legacy of a certain literary critical language of the journal La Voce. Yet—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 Macri, Luciano Anceschi, Piero Bigongiati), it helped them arrive at a mature and perceptive formulation and evaluation of contemporary Italian poetry.