Giuseppe Ungaretti (; 8 February 1888 – 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as ("Hermeticism"), he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th-century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Like many futurists, he took an irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, ("The Joy").
During the interwar period, Ungaretti worked as a journalist with Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession), as well as a foreign-based correspondent for and . While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed Hermeticism as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career.
Biography
Early life
Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of Lucca. Ungaretti's father worked on digging the Suez Canal, where he suffered a fatal accident in 1890. He abandoned Christianity and became an atheist. It was not until 1928 that he returned to the Catholic faith.
In 1912, the 24-year-old Giuseppe Ungaretti moved to Paris, France. On his way there, he stopped in Rome, Florence and Milan, meeting face to face with Prezzolini. Apollinaire's work came to be a noted influence on his own. as well as with the independent visual artist Amedeo Modigliani.
World War I and debut
Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ungaretti, like his Futurist friends, supported an irredentist position, and called for his country's intervention on the side of the Entente Powers. Enrolled in the infantry a year later, he saw action on the Northern Italian theater, serving in the trenches. In contrast to his early enthusiasm, he became appalled by the realities of war. Although depicting the hardships of war life, his celebrated L'Allegria was not unenthusiastic about its purpose (even if in the poem "Fratelli", and in others, he describes the absurdity of the war and the brotherhood between all the men); this made Ungaretti's stance contrast with that of Lost Generation writers, who questioned their countries' intents, and similar to that of Italian intellectuals such as Soffici, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Piero Jahier and Curzio Malaparte.
By the time the 1918 armistice was signed, Ungaretti was again in Paris, He published a volume of French-language poetry, titled La guerre ("The War", 1919). In 1920, Giuseppe Ungaretti married the Frenchwoman Jeanne Dupoix, with whom he had a daughter, Ninon (born 1925), and a son, Antonietto (born 1930). In May 1921, he was present at the Dadaist mock trial of reactionary author Maurice Barrès, during which the Dadaist movement began to separate itself into two competing parts, headed respectively by Tzara and André Breton. He was also affiliated with the literary circle formed around the journal La Ronda. He argued: "The first task of the Academy will be to reestablish a certain connection between men of letters, between writers, teachers, publicists. This people hungers for poetry. If it had not been for the miracle of Blackshirts, we would never have leaped this far."
In 1925, Ungaretti experienced a religious crisis, which, three years later, made him return to the Roman Catholic Church. The new trend, inspired by both Symbolism and Futurism, had its origins in both Il porto sepolto, where Ungaretti had eliminated structure, syntax and punctuation, and the earlier contributions of Arturo Onofri.
At the close of the war, following Mussolini's downfall, Ungaretti was expelled from the faculty owing to his fascist connections, but reinstated when his colleagues voted in favor of his return. connecting it with his experience of death and pain as a soldier at war. The hope of brotherhood between all the people is expressed strongly, together with the desire of searching for a renovated "harmony" with the universe, impressive in the famous verses of Mattina:
A famous poem regarding the First World War is Soldati (soldiers), which emblematically and emotionally describes their feelings of uncertainty and fear:
In the successive works he studied the importance of the poetic word (marked by Hermeticism and symbolism), as the only way to save the humanity from the universal horror, and was searching for a new way to recuperate the roots of the Italian classical poetry. His last verses are on the poem l'Impietrito e il Velluto, about the memory of the bright universe eyed Dunja, an old woman that was house guest of his mother in the time of his childhood. Here is the end:
Legacy
Although Ungaretti parted company with Ermetismo ("Hermeticism"), his early experiments were continued for a while by poets such as Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi and Leonardo Sinisgalli.