PASCOLI, GIOVANNI. — Poet, born on 31 December 1855 at S. Mauro di Romagna, died in Bologna on 6 April 1912 and buried in the chapel beside the house at Castelvecchio di Barga in Lucchesia. Of adolescence and early youth, a vivid image surviving in every later work is death: the anguished memory of the assassination (10 August 1867) of his father Ruggero, steward of the Torlonia princes, and the unbroken bereavements of his family: in November 1868 his sister Margherita died, in December his mother Caterina Vincenzi Allocatelli, in 1871 his brother Luigi, and in 1876 his eldest brother Giacomo. He received a humanistic education at the “Raffaello” college in Urbino, run by the Piarist fathers (among them he would remember Fr. Donati), and completed his university studies, as a pupil of Carducci and Gandino, in Bologna, where in 1882 he graduated with a study on the poetry of Alcco.
He was not uninvolved in the political movements of his time: he wrote his first articles for Andrea Costa’s Il martello, declaring himself “a socialist not of a party, but of humanity,” and was arrested and held for several months in preventive detention at S. Giovanni in Monte for having taken part in a violent demonstration by the Internationalists. P.’s life was subsequently bound up with the affairs of teaching. His wanderings through Italy as a professor of Latin and Greek took him to the secondary schools of Matera, Massa, and Livorno; only in 1895 was he entrusted with the teaching of Greek and Latin literature at the University of Bologna. He was then transferred as a full professor to Messina, to the chair of Latin literature; in 1903 he moved to Pisa and two years later to Bologna, as Carducci’s successor.
The first lyrics, sent now to Cronaca bizantina, now to Convito, appeared in 1891, collected in the small volume Myricae (1st ed., Livorno)—a funerary stele dedicated to his dead—which, beyond all Arcadian affectation, nevertheless gives form and colour to a new vision of nature, discovered and expressed in a distinctive poetics: that of the little child who sees and seeks the world with astonished eyes, with a fanciful and dreaming spirit. “Poetry is born,” P. wrote, “and precisely because it is poetry (without being moral, civic, patriotic, or social poetry), it benefits morality, the homeland, and society.” Thus, amid memories of Romagna, amid the Apuan Alps, the Pania, and the village of Barga, in clearly defined settings, unfold the Poemetti (Florence 1897), the Canti di Castelvecchio (Bologna 1903), and the Nuovi poemetti (ibid. 1909), true modern bucolic and Georgic poems, which reveal in P., beyond his Virgilian love of the earth, an aspiration to transcend the positivist idea of the age toward a more universal conception of life. From the agnosticism concerning reality and history inherited from Giuseppe Ferrari and Edoardo Hartmann, the poet passes to a conception of existence founded on the duty of goodness; and, as a corollary to the Leopardian solidarity of La ginestra, he adds acceptance of mystery. Within this sphere of ideal passions and conflicts inherent in life, he questions the cosmos and the people of his generation, considering them as outside time, symbols ab aeterno (Odi e inni, Bologna 1906). Through bold innovations, his poetry proposes and establishes new cycles for a modern epic, defining in extenso the millennial mission of medieval and modern Italy (Poemi del Risorgimento, Inno e Roma, Inno e Torino, ibid. 1913; Poemi italici and Canzone di re Enzio, ibid. 1914); the meaning and spirituality of the historical events of ancient Rome (Carmina, ibid. 1914); and the still youthful aspects of the Homeric epic, Greek myths, and Platonic intuitions (Poemi conviviali, ibid. 1904), which in neoclassicism had seemed to have found their death. There is no literary or cultural residue in P.’s poetry; his poetry, as Serra said, “is of things, it is in the very heart of things.” Hence a kind of impressionism, which sometimes folds back upon childish affectations and mannerisms, so as to justify in certain lyrics Croce’s formula of a P. who was “ataxic,” unable to coordinate his movements. Yet in both the greater and lesser P. there is always a unique dexterity and mastery of language, and a rare effectiveness of creative invention; the novelty of the images, the analysis of sensations, the felicitous use of adjectives, the frequent analogies, and the phonic value of the word (“I think that no modern artist possessed his art as G. P. possessed it,” D’Annunzio noted) are in harmony with the life of the countryside he described, with the evocation of domestic joys, and with his love—almost a religious cult—of ancient memories.
The principal document of the learned P. is constituted by the Latin anthologies: Epos (Livorno 1895), Lyra romana (ibid. 1897; V. Orazio); the Italian anthologies: Sul limitare (Palermo 1889) and Fior da fiore (ibid. 1901), which reflect the orientation of his taste; and the volumes of Dante criticism: Minerva oscura (Livorno 1898), Sotto il velame (Messina 1900), La mirabile visione (ibid. 1902), Conferenze e studi danteschi (Bologna 1915), in which symbolic and mystical investigations—at times arbitrary and anti-historical—prevail: on human nature personified in Dante; on original sin and the reconquest of the earthly paradise; on the parallels of the Cross and the Eagle and the structure of the three canticles; and on the “triple allegorical incarnation” of the poet in Jacob, Aeneas, and Paul.
Although the poet confessed to Giovanni Acri that for him religion had to be “a simple submission of the soul without any form of external worship,” the rift between P.’s ideal and the Catholic ideal is clearly visible. To find solace for his doubt and anguished search, P. took refuge in a vague, sentimental religiosity, in an aesthetic Christianity and Franciscanism. Humanity always appeared to him in a zone of mysterious shadow, like that which surrounds I due orfani in the dark night, or the Christians kneeling before La Porta Santa: a humanity over which hangs the terrible fate of final destruction (Il ciocco). Reflecting a religious hope, something invoked by his feeling in opposition to reason, are certain Carmina (Poemata christiana: Centurio, 1901; Paedagogium, 1903; Fumum Apollinis, 1904; Agape, 1905; Post accasum urbis, 1907; Pomponia Graecina, 1909; Thallusa, 1911), in which Latin poetry flourishes in hexameters or in the metres of Horace and Catullus, with a richness and appropriateness of language that takes account not only of the poets of the Augustan age, but also of prose writers such as Varro, Columella, and Pliny; an original and modern poetry that wonderfully expresses the pathos of the pagan world in agony and the trembling expectation of Christian light. These lyrics are in unison with those of the Italian P., when he draws from Christian dogma and ethics motifs with which to describe the hour of prayer (L'Angelus), the life and death of a virgin (Suor Virginia), the parables of the Lord (Piccolo Vangelo), the shepherds of Bethlehem (In Oriente), the announcement in Rome of the new freedom granted to the gladiator who dies, after the Saturnalia, on the night of the Nativity (In Occidente); or when he raises the question of the divine purpose in choosing, among millions of stars, only the earth for the Incarnation (La Pecorella smarrita); or rediscovers, in the atmosphere of the Fioretti, the meaning of poverty and of nature, the daughter of God (Paulo Ucello); or invokes the Eucharist for his passing (Il Viatico). All this validates Pietrobono’s judgment: “He did not rediscover God with the certainty of his early years; but he sought Him tirelessly; he was unable, to his profound regret, to regain faith in the immortality of the soul, but he invoked it throughout his life; he never even imagined that he might pass for a philosopher, but he never ceased to ponder within himself the supreme problems. In short, he did not arrive at a solution, and this troubles many; this state of mind is precisely where the reason for his poetry lies...
Like his Tolstoy, he continued to search and search to the very end, and death surprised him still wandering through the dark regions of being and non-being, his dim lamp in hand, and extinguished it.”