RAPISARDI, MARIO. — Poet, born in Catania on 25 February 1844, died there on 4 January 1912. He taught Italian literature at the University of his native city.
A solitary and embittered temperament, after an initially superficial optimism, in which, with the poem La palingenesi (1868), he hoped for a religious renewal conceived in the secular terms of the anticlericalism and positivism then in vogue, he adopted, in keeping with Carducci’s Satanism, the role of celebrator of Lucifer, as a symbol of progress and vanquisher of superstition, in the eponymous poem (1877), saturated with mockery of Catholic dogma (noteworthy is his polemic with Carducci, provoked by several satirical tercets in the poem). In Giobbe (1884), the biblical figure is degraded into a kind of positivist Faust, amid blasphemous details and sacrilegiously sensual deliriums. Inspired by socialist ideas is the lyrical collection entitled Giustizia (1883), while the small volume Poesie religiose (1887), although it represents the artistically most successful section of Rapisardi’s substantial work, nevertheless does not transcend the limits of a religion of nature, conceived as the destination of human anguish before the mystery; and the Poemetti (1885–1907) are also pervaded by intimate sadness, while the poem l’Atlantide (1894) marks a socialist revival.
The exuberance of his Sicilian nature very often carried R. toward verbal sonority and ponderous structures, in an attempt to transfigure concepts into poetic phantoms; yet his poetry contains oases of classical restraint, and his versions of Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, and Shelley were highly esteemed.