DOI article:
Benson, Eugene: Gabriele d'Annunzio: the new poet and his work
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.38746#0303
By Eugene Benson 299
tive and pagan artists of the Italian renaissance like Poliziano, for
example, close as he seems to him by his serene plastic sense ; it
is this which attaches him to Petrarch and Tasso, in his later
verse ; still a pagan, yet with sorrow, and all her family of sighs
and tears, become conscious that the life of the senses is not the
be-all and end-all of existence. The new pagan is touched by
something he cannot define, something that escapes form, yet
permeates it. So d’Annunzio becomes in poetry what Chopin is
in music, a “ sovereign master of every melody.” With the re-
finement of a Provenqal, with the serenity of a Greek, he sang of
delightful romantic and classic things, of gardens and fetes, and
all that belongs to the life of elegance.
He has a sixteenth-century face, like a portrait by Clouet :
fine, sensitive, intense ; implying close acquaintance with the
uncommon. Like a later Leonardo, he is a lover of the beautiful
hands of women ; like him, he is learned in the mysteries of their
touch ; like him, he is a student of their smile ; no grace or
seduction of their being is lost upon him. Like the painter of
the Sacred and ‘Profane Love, he illustrates the beauty, he ex-
presses the significance, of flesh. But little past thirty, his pro-
ductiveness during the last twelve or thirteen years is remarkable.
He began with a thin volume of verse : Intermezzo in rime; then
wrote II Piacere in prose ; then in verse PIsotteo ; La Chimera ;
Elegie Romane; Odi Navali; Poema Paradisiaco. Without
mentioning all his prose romances, brilliant as they are in many
respects, and foreign to English taste, the most acceptable is the
last one : u the golden book of spirit and sense,” the Tre Fergine
delle Rocce.
tive and pagan artists of the Italian renaissance like Poliziano, for
example, close as he seems to him by his serene plastic sense ; it
is this which attaches him to Petrarch and Tasso, in his later
verse ; still a pagan, yet with sorrow, and all her family of sighs
and tears, become conscious that the life of the senses is not the
be-all and end-all of existence. The new pagan is touched by
something he cannot define, something that escapes form, yet
permeates it. So d’Annunzio becomes in poetry what Chopin is
in music, a “ sovereign master of every melody.” With the re-
finement of a Provenqal, with the serenity of a Greek, he sang of
delightful romantic and classic things, of gardens and fetes, and
all that belongs to the life of elegance.
He has a sixteenth-century face, like a portrait by Clouet :
fine, sensitive, intense ; implying close acquaintance with the
uncommon. Like a later Leonardo, he is a lover of the beautiful
hands of women ; like him, he is learned in the mysteries of their
touch ; like him, he is a student of their smile ; no grace or
seduction of their being is lost upon him. Like the painter of
the Sacred and ‘Profane Love, he illustrates the beauty, he ex-
presses the significance, of flesh. But little past thirty, his pro-
ductiveness during the last twelve or thirteen years is remarkable.
He began with a thin volume of verse : Intermezzo in rime; then
wrote II Piacere in prose ; then in verse PIsotteo ; La Chimera ;
Elegie Romane; Odi Navali; Poema Paradisiaco. Without
mentioning all his prose romances, brilliant as they are in many
respects, and foreign to English taste, the most acceptable is the
last one : u the golden book of spirit and sense,” the Tre Fergine
delle Rocce.