Giosuč Carducci
Giosuč Carducci, (b. July
27, 1835, Val di Castello, near Lucca, Tuscany [now
Italy]—d. Feb. 16, 1907, Bologna, Italy), Italian poet,
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906, and one of
the most influential literary figures of his age.
The son of a republican
country doctor, Carducci spent his childhood in the wild
Maremma region of southern Tuscany. He studied at the
University of Pisa and in 1860 became professor of Italian
literature at Bologna, where he lectured for more than 40
years. He was made a senator for life in 1890 and was
revered by the Italians as a national poet.
In his youth Carducci was
the centre of a group of young men determined to overthrow
the prevailing Romanticism and to return to classical
models. Giuseppe Parini, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo
were his masters, and their influence is evident in his
first books of poems (Rime, 1857; later collected in
Juvenilia [1880] and Levia gravia [1868; “Light and Serious
Poems”]). He showed both his great power as a poet and the
strength of his republican, anticlerical feeling in his hymn
to Satan, “Inno a Satana” (1863), and in his Giambi ed epodi
(1867–69; “Iambics and Epodes”), inspired chiefly by
contemporary politics. Its violent, bitter language reflects
the virile, rebellious character of the poet.
Rime nuove (1887; The New
Lyrics) and Odi barbare (1877; The Barbarian Odes) contain
the best of Carducci’s poetry: the evocations of the Maremma
landscape and the memories of childhood; the lament for the
loss of his only son; the representation of great historical
events; and the ambitious attempts to recall the glory of
Roman history and the pagan happiness of classical
civilization. Carducci’s enthusiasm for the classical in art
led him to adapt Latin prosody to Italian verse, and his Odi
barbare are written in metres imitative of Horace and
Virgil. His research in Italian literature was warmed by his
poetic imagination and style, and his best prose works equal
his poetry.
