T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and many social upheavals, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry. Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once-glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labors led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations—including such marvelously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini—extended the promise of the prewar era into our time. Surprising and illuminating, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets—seventy-three in all—in conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Charles Wright, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.

    Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits imposed by the educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Schopenauer, and many others with a critical mind.Renzo died on November 22 (1922), at the hands of the police.We are very excited to present this collection of all of the known writings of Renzo Novatore, newly translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. It contains the fiery polemics, poetry, and willful play that readers of "Toward the Creative Nothing" are already familiar with. For those new to the writings of Renzo prepare for an emotional cavalcade of egoism, nihilism, and hatred for democratic mediocrity. To life!

    Before his tragically early death from consumption at the age of thirty five he produced two short volumes of verse La via del rifugio and I colloqui , the latter rendered into English as The Colloquies , which quickly became renown for their quietly perfect evocations of nature, melancholy, tenderness and nostalgia.But unknown to most English speakers Gozzano also wrote short stories, conte cruels influenced by Poe and Maupassant and aesthetic prose nightmares; both of which display the same delicate crepuscular style and sense of tragic absurdism. Requiems & Nightmares collects together the best of these tales and presents them to the Anglophone reader for the first time.Within these pages the reader will find The Real Face, the bizarre fate of a promising young artist whose works grow too close to nature; A Romantic Story , a Gothic tragedy and The Soul of the Instrument , a Symbolist fairy tale after the manner of Lorrain and Wilde, along with other morbid and fantastic pieces. An exquisite item for those interested in Italian poets of the early twentieth century and the various literary movements which bloomed in that country in the years following the Fin de siècle.