Clemente Rebora tra il 1913 e il 1923: Uno studio sull'epistolario e l'opera poetica

Abstract

Abstract This dissertation focuses above all on Clemente Rebora’s epistolary: that of 1916, 1920-1923 and 1913-1914 respectively. In Chapter I, the analysis concerns the period, following a war accident and its very serious consequences on his psychophysical health, of Rebora’s return home from the battle front. He develops a particular condition of anxiety that causes him to abandon creative and public writing. The scrutiny of several letters that Rebora writes in 1916 shows how they seem to be endowed with a sort of metapsychical power and would have the purpose of guarding and protecting from death the addressees who still fight in the trenches (in particular his brother Piero and his friend Angelo Monteverdi). The psychological attitude that Rebora assumes in this period towards “private” writing will also tend in the future to make him consider literary work, in particular poetry, less and less important. In the second period taken into consideration (about 1920-1923), corresponding to Chapter II, Rebora’s approach to oriental disciplines (yoga and Buddhism) and his in-depth studies of the works of Giuseppe Mazzini is investigated. In 1922-1923 Rebora publishes the translation and commentary of Gogol’s The Overcoat, the translation and commentary of the anonymous Indian short story Gianardana and the collection of nine poems that make up the Canti anonimi. A cross-comparison has been made between letters and commentaries and between commentaries and poems with a double purpose: to clarify, on the one hand, the ideological and political position of Rebora, who in this period develops Mazzini’s idea according to which humanity is entering a “new era” of collective faith; on the other hand, to provide a non-traditional critical interpretation of Dall’imagine tesa, the most representative and even most debated lyric of Canti anonimi. In Chapter III, the epistolary from the period immediately following the publication of Rebora’s first poetry collection (Frammenti lirici, 1913) is read and analyzed above all from the morphological (syntactic-grammatical) point of view and compared with the stylistic features of the Frammenti lirici and with those of the four articles that Rebora writes for the cultural and literary journal «La Voce» in the same period. The formal analogies found in these three different textual genres allow the affirmation that in Rebora there is a sort of unitary “psychological etymology”, which on the level of linguistic construction seems to move the poet and the columnist, the lyrist and the intellectual in the same way. Chapter IV continues and integrates the analysis made in the previous chapter and compares the poetry of the Frammenti lirici with that of two other “new” and contemporary poets of Rebora, namely Piero Jahier and Giovanni Boine, in order to verify to what extent Rebora’s poetic language is actually original and how much it is rather emblematic of an era. The result of the survey confirms the prerogatives of originality of the Frammenti lirici’s poetry, and also highlights in it higher standards of spontaneity than that found in the lyrics of the other two poets.