Gozzano, Guido

GOZZANO, GUIDO. - Poet, b. at Agliè Canavese on 19 Dec. 1883, d. there on 9 Aug. 1916. Having earned a degree in law, he did not practice as a lawyer, turning instead to a literary life. As a poet and as a prose writer he succeeded in forging a style of his own, in which even his imitations (of Pascoli, D'Annunzio, Nietzsche) and the echoes of his readings of Dante merge into a hallmark of musicality and of singular turns of phrase. His work, made up of verse and of narrative prose scattered in periodicals, is collected in volumes: I tre talismani (fairy tales, 1904); La via del rifugio (lyric poems, 1907); Colloqui (lyric poems, 1911); L'Altare del passato (short stories, 1916); Verso la cuna del mondo (letters from India, 1917); La principessa si sposa (fairy tales, 1917); L'ultima traccia (short stories, 1919); I primi e gli ultimi colloqui (1925).

Stricken by tuberculosis (he died of it at the age of 33 during the First World War), G. felt acutely, in the very collapse of his physical energy, the whole drama of an age of transition, oscillating between a gentle nostalgia for the past and a sorrowful foreboding of the future. Disturbed by an exasperated sensuality, mentally disoriented by the contemporary culture pervaded by paradoxical philosophies, ruthlessly sincere toward others and toward himself, he lost the certainty of God, though he always yearned for it painfully amid the folds of an irony free of malice, smiling with tranquil detachment, as he reveals in the Ultimi colloqui and in the question: « non morirò premendo il rosario - contro la bocca in grazia del Signore ? ».

Salvatore Lombardo Restivo