RAPSARDI, MARIO. – Poet, born in Catania on 25 Feb. 1844, died there on 4 Jan. 1912. He taught Italian literature at the local university.
Of solitary and irascible temperament, after an initial phase of superficial optimism, in which, with the poem La plaigne (1868), he advocated a religious renewal conceived in the secular terms of anticlericalism and the positivism then in vogue, he adopted, in harmony with Carducci’s Satanism, the stance of a celebrator of Lucifer as the symbol of progress and the vanquisher of superstition in the eponymous poem (1877), replete with mockery of Catholic dogma (notable is his polemic with Carducci provoked by the culminating satirical tercets of the poem). In Giobbe (1884), the biblical figure is degraded to a kind of positivist Faust, interspersed with blasphemous details and sacrilegiously sensual deliriums. Inspired by socialist ideas is the lyric collection entitled Giustizia (1883), while the slim volume of Poesie religiose (1887), though representing the most artistically successful section of Rapsardi’s vast œuvre, does not transcend the limits of a religion of nature, conceived as the haven of human anguish before mystery; and the Poemetti (1885–1907) are likewise pervaded by an intimate sadness, while the poem L’Atlantide (1894) marks a resumption of socialist themes.
The exuberance of his insular temperament often led R. to verbal sonorities and cumbersome structures, in an attempt to transfigure concepts into poetic phantoms; yet his poetry does not lack oases of classical measure, and his translations from Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, and Shelley were highly esteemed.