CARDUCCI, GIOSUÈ

CARDUCCI, GIOSUÈ (1835–1907), Italy's most notable poet of the post-Risorgimento era and the first Italian to win the Nobel prize.

Giosuè Carducci's poems, essays, editorial activities, and an occasional excursion into political life expressed the bitter discontent of many intellectuals with the new Italy that had been created in 1860. Although he did not participate in the wars of national unification, Carducci was a supporter of the republican nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, but in 1859 and 1860 he accepted the necessity of uniting behind the monarchy. The triumph of the house of Savoy over the popular forces of Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi provided a harbinger of the compromises and political deal making of the new parliamentary political class that Carducci judged incapable of realizing the potential greatness of the new Italy. The age of poetry seemed to give way to the age of accountants' ledgers. During the 1860s Carducci returned to republicanism and to faith in a popular leader who could embody the aspirations of the people.

What particularly annoyed him were the efforts of the new Italy to find a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. Carducci was a lifelong anticlerical who held the church responsible for Italy's cultural and political backwardness, and he was incensed by the decision of the new government to bow to the wishes of the French emperor Louis Napoleon by blocking Giuseppe Garibaldi's attempts to seize Rome. In one of his first poems from the collection Juvenilia (1859–1860), Carducci wrote of independence and love of liberty that were "highly contemptuous of the Holy and Catholic Idea of a Church fixed on the firm foundation / of servile Europe's humiliation" (p. 3). His most notorious poem, Hymn to Satan (1865) identified Satan with nature, reason, and the spirit of rebellion against the combined forces of the church and the reactionary state. His collections Levia gravia (1868; Light and heavy) and Giambi ed epodi (1867–1869; Iambs and epodes) hammered away at the failure of the new state to respond to the currents of patriotic sentiment that had been unleashed by the Risorgimento, the movement for the political unification of Italy.

Despite his youthful reputation as a rebel, the new liberal monarchy appointed Carducci to the chair of rhetoric at the University of Bologna in 1860, a post he would hold until 1904. Although he never accepted the wheeling and dealing of parliamentary life, Carducci's republicanism became increasingly muted during the 1870s. He ran for Parliament in 1876 but failed to take his seat on a technicality. His poetry also became less overtly political and more personal and historical over time. In 1878, on the occasion of a visit by Italy's royal couple, Umberto I and Queen Margherita, Carducci was so taken by Margherita that he dedicated one of the poems in the collection Odi barbari (Barbarous odes) to her. The Odi barbari, published in various editions from 1877 to 1889, was Carducci's most significant work. The poems were marked by a rejection of Romanticism, which Carducci judged a foreign import, in favor of a renewed classicism. Carducci's productivity declined after a stroke in 1885, but by then his reputation in Italy was established.

During the 1880s and 1890s Carducci's politics became increasingly nationalistic. He was a firm supporter of the Sicilian statesman Francesco Crispi, who tried to combine a degree of social and economic reform with strong personal government and a dose of imperialism. The disastrous end to Crispi's government in 1896, when Italy was defeated by the Ethiopians at Adwa, failed to shake Carducci's loyalty to the Sicilian leader. For many post-Risorgimento intellectuals, of which Carducci was representative, an aggressive foreign policy and strong government were shortcuts to great-power status. They held that failure resulted not from bad planning or misguided policies but from the incapacity of parliamentary government to focus the national will. Thus Carducci's politics fed the growing antiparliamentary tradition that manifested itself after 1900 in organizations like the Italian Nationalist Association.

See alsoAnticlericalism; Crispi, Francesco; Italy; Mazzini, Giuseppe; Nationalism.

bibliography

Carducci, Giosuè. Carducci: A Selection of His Poems with Verse Translations, Notes, and Three Introductory Essays. Edited by G. L. Bickersteth. London, 1913.

Drake, Richard. Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878–1900. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Alexander De Grand