NEGRI, ADA. - Poet, b. of a humble family at Lodi on 3 Feb. 1870, d. at Milan on 11 Jan. 1945.
She entrusted to the novel Stella matutina (1921) the memory of her tormented youth. Great interest was aroused by her first volume of verse, Fatalità (1892), an emphatic exaltation of socialist ideas, with some anticlerical touches. Less successful was Tempeste (1894), which repeated the same themes. After her marriage, she devoted to motherhood the volume of verse of the same name (1904), in which man's sorrow and the mystery of the soul find, because deepened by experience, effective expression. An even more closely observed inner exploration drives the collection Dal profondo (1910) and impels N. toward a keener sense of solitude (L'esilio, 1914). After the Libro di Mara (1919), a vigorous, often crude expression of a love of late youth, suddenly cut short by death, there is a withdrawal toward the contemplation, at times sorrowful, of nature with I canti dell'Isola (1924). From then on N.'s thought turns more decisively toward God (Vespertina,
1930; Il dono, 1936). While working on Fons amoris, a posthumous volume (1946) that may be considered her spiritual testament, she thought of preparing a prose trilogy: S. Caterina da Siena, s. Teresa del Bambino Gesù, s. Francesco Saverio Cabrini; only the essay on the Saint of Lisieux appeared. Il Crocifisso rotto, to which N. had devoted one of her most significant spiritual pages, by her testamentary wish was placed beside her and closed with her in the coffin.
The undeniable influences of Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli and d'Annunzio do not prejudice the precise originality of tone of N.'s poetry. The moral inquiry into the problems of life is conveyed through a succession of colorful images, logically closely knit and alien to hermeticism. Nor does the clarity of her poetics (poetry of feeling, not sentimental) settle into rhythm with crepuscular complacency, but resolves within itself, in supreme harmony, those inner landscapes of the soul discovered by a sincere lyrical emotion: rebellions, discouragements, resentments and a bitter sense of life are finally calmed in a progressive inner illumination, in the genuine understanding of Christian values, in the definitive and integral adherence to the Catholic faith, in the yearning to share with other souls the spiritual serenity she had attained. N.'s volume Fatalità is on the Index (decree of 14 July 1893).