PASCOLI, GIOVANNI. - Poet, b. 31 Dec. 1855 at S. Mauro di Romagna, d. at Bologna 6 Apr. 1912 and buried in the chapel, near the house, at Castelvecchio di Barga in the Lucchesia. Of his adolescence and early youth, the living and surviving image in every future work remains death: the sorrowful memory of the murder (10 Aug. 1867) of his father Ruggero, steward of the princes Torlonia, the uninterrupted bereavements of his family: in Nov. 1868 his sister Margherita died, in Dec. his mother Caterina Vincenzi Allocatelli, in 1871 his brother Luigi, in 1876 the eldest of the brothers, Giacomo. He received a humanistic education at the "Raffaello" college in Urbino run by the Piarist Fathers (he would recall, among them all, Fr. Donati) and completed his university courses, a disciple of Carducci and of Gandino, at Bologna, where in 1882 he graduated with a study on the poetry of Alcaeus.
He was not extraneous to the political movements of his time: he wrote his first articles for Il martello of Andrea Costa, declaring himself "a socialist not of a party, but of humanity," and he suffered arrest and several months of preventive detention at S. Giovanni in Monte, for having taken part in a violent demonstration of the internationalists. Pascoli's life was thereafter bound to the vicissitudes of teaching. His wanderings through Italy, as a professor of Latin and Greek, have as their meeting places the secondary schools of Matera, Massa, Livorno; only in 1895 was he entrusted with the post of Greek and Latin literature at the University of Bologna. Transferred then as 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 the Cronaca bizantina, now to the Convito, appeared in 1891 gathered in the little volume Myricae (1st ed. Livorno) - a funeral stele dedicated to his dead - where, free of all Arcadian complacency, there nevertheless takes shape and color a new vision of nature, discovered and declared in a poetics of election: that of the "little boy" who sees and explores the world with wondering eyes, with a fantastical and dreaming soul. "Poetry is born," wrote Pascoli, "which, by the very fact that it is poetry (without being moral, civic, patriotic, social poetry), benefits morality, the fatherland, society." Thus among the remembrances of Romagna, among the Apuan Alps, the Pania, the village of Barga, in very precise settings range the Poemetti (Florence 1897), the Canti di Castelvecchio (Bologna 1903), the Nuovi poemetti (ibid. 1909), true modern bucolics and georgics, which reveal in Pascoli, beyond the Virgilian love of the land, an anxiety to pass beyond the positivist idea of his time toward a more universal concept of life. From the agnosticism concerning reality and history, derived from Giuseppe Ferrari and from Eduard Hartmann, the poet passes to a conception of existence founded on the duty of goodness, and to the Leopardian solidarity of the Ginestra as a corollary he adds the acceptance of mystery. In this circle of ideal passions and of contrasts inherent in life he questions the cosmos, the men of his generation, and considers them as outside of time, symbols ab aeterno (Odi e inni, Bologna 1906). With bold innovations his poetry proposes and founds new cycles for a modern epos, 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); the still youthful aspects of the Homeric epic, of the Greek myths, of the Platonic intuitions (Poemi conviviali, ibid. 1904), which in neoclassicism seemed to have found death. There is no literary and cultural residue in Pascoli's poetry; his poetry, as Serra said, "is of things, is in the very heart of things." Hence a kind of impressionism, which sometimes falls back on childish affectations and manners, enough to justify in certain lyrics Croce's formula of an "atactic" Pascoli, not a coordinator of his movements. But in Pascoli, major and minor, there is still always a dexterity and a unique experience of language and a rare efficacy of creative invention; the novelty of the images, the analysis of sensations, the happy use of adjectives, the frequent analogies, the phonic value of the word ("I think that no modern artist possessed his art as G. P. possessed his," noted D'Annunzio), are in harmony with the life of the countryside he describes, with the evocation of domestic joys and with the love, almost a religious cult, of ancient memories.
The major document of Pascoli as scholar are the Latin anthologies: Epos (Livorno 1895), Lyra romana (ibid. 1897; see the introductory essay Storia della poesia lirica in Roma sino alla morte di Orazio), the Italian ones: 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 researches prevail, sometimes arbitrary and anti-historical, on human nature personified in Dante, on original sin and the reconquest of the earthly paradise, on the parallelisms of the Cross and the Eagle and the structure of the three cantiche, on the "triple allegorical incarnation" of the poet in Jacob, Aeneas, Paul.
Since, as the poet confessed to Giovanni Acri, for him religion had to be "a simple submission of the soul without any form of external worship," the fracture between P.'s ideal and the Catholic ideal is visible. To comfort his doubt and his anguished searching, P. took refuge in a vague religiosity of sentiment, in an aesthetic Christianity and Franciscanism. Humanity always appeared to him in a zone of mysterious shadow, like the one that encircles I due orfani in the dark night, or Christendom kneeling before La Porta Santa, a humanity over which looms the terrible fate of final destruction (Il ciocco). A reflection of a religious hope, of what his sentiment invoked in contrast with reason, are certain Carmina (Poemata christiana: Centurio, 1901; Paedagogium, 1903; Fumum Apollinis, 1904; Agape, 1905; Post accasum urbis, 1907; Pomponia Graecina, 1909; Thallusa, 1911), where Latin poetry blossoms in hexameters or in the meters of Horace and Catullus, with a richness and propriety of language that takes into account not only the poets of the Augustan age, but prose writers such as Varro, Columella, and Pliny; an original and modern poetry, which wonderfully expresses the pathos of the pagan world in agony and the trembling expectation of the Christian light. Lyrics that are in unison with those of the Italian P., when from the dogma and ethics of Christianity he draws motifs 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 franchise to the gladiator who dies, after the Saturnalia, on the night of the Nativity (In Occidente), or when he poses the question about 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 sense of poverty and of nature, daughter of God (Paulo Ucello), or invokes, for his passing, the Eucharist (Il Viatico). All this makes valid Pietrobono's judgment: "He did not find God again with the certainty of his early years; but he sought him tirelessly; he could not, to his deep regret, reconquer faith in the immortality of the soul, but he invoked it all his life; he did not even imagine that he could pass for a philosopher, but he never ceased to agitate the greatest problems within himself. In short, he did not arrive at a solution, and many are annoyed by this; by this which is the state of mind in which lies the reason for his poetry...
Like his Tolstoy he continued to seek and seek until the end, and death surprised him still wandering through the dark regions of being and non-being with his faint lamp in hand, and it extinguished it for him."