HERMETISM, LITERARY. — The term, initially used only to denote the Italian poetic movement roughly dated between the two wars, was later extended to indicate an entire segment of militant Italian literature, which, due to particular spiritual and technical affinities with French symbolism and surrealism, certain mystical and Platonizing veins, a certain abrupt difficulty, analogical harshness, and evocative indefiniteness, could be described as “hermetic.” The movement accepted this term, even though it came from those who opposed it and wished, in this sense, to dismiss the literature of the latest generations as obscure and devoid of concreteness.
Despite polemical ferment and absolute descriptive novelty, hermetism could not but be a direct offspring of Italian Decadentism, if not of its more ostentatious and commonplace variety (D’Annunzio, Il Convito, Cronaca bizantina), certainly of its more inward, more humanly clarifying strain (Pascoli above all). And the path of hermetic poetry, from Ungaretti’s earliest “cries” to Montale’s Le Occasioni, from Quasimodo to Sinisgalli, from Luzi to Sereni, from Bertocchi to Gatto, has been a reasoned and profound rediscovery of a lyrical language that appears ever more traditional in form, yet ever newer in its religious human values in Ungaretti, in Montale’s anguished personality, in Quasimodo’s social elegy. Thus, the poetics of hermetism resides precisely in this yearning 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 one’s own existence.
Less rich in positive results, but no less important culturally, has been—or is—the hermetic criticism, which (apart from the usual exaggerations of its satellites and epigones) sought, in ancient and modern poetry, not the historical datum, not the cultural setting, not the historicist discrimination of poetry and literature, but rather the inner life of the poet in the poem, the unconscious and most subtle adaptation of the writer to the myth of the poetic word. This led, and was the worst consequence, to a critical writing that was abstruse, difficult, and convoluted: perhaps a legacy of a certain literary-critical language from 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. Hence, more so in the best hermetic critics (Carlo Bo, Oreste Macrì, Luciano Anceschi, Piero Bigongiari), who arrived at a mature and perspicacious approach to and evaluation of contemporary Italian poetry.