Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

simple sketches are replaced by satirical and

polemical comments that strike at the

government and its Ministers, the Cardinals,

the officials. At times Marini’s verses, who

does not stray far from the usual trite and

vapid themes, finds a genuine parodistic

vein which, however, gets soon diluted in

the ritual of images and in the standard

repertory of scenes that never approach

Belli’s human and poetic sensibility. It is

clear that the aforementioned poets lack the

participation and adherence to the world

they are representing and evoking, and they

lack the conviction that poetry must be

something other than descriptivity tout-

court.

They don’t even have that generic

disenchantment (non-committal, for some

critics) shown later by Trilussa as he crossed

the broken doors of fairy-tales, which are