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

conspicuous examples with his collections.

Every poet has felt the need, somewhat

administered on the intellectual level, to

compete with poets in Italian or, as is

frequently the case, with the other side of

themselves which thought in Italian. There

has been, and this is what we are speaking of

most of all, an avant-garde dialect poetry

that was inconceivable before. The

traditional viewpoint tended to reaffirm

tradition, arousing great diffidence in critics

who in the end, until Croce, have considered

dialect poetry inferior to that in Italian. But

the experimental tendency has definitively

won, and not only in the North of Italy, but,

what is more surprising, in the South as

well, where there persists not a longing for

times past as in remote times (those of Basile

and Cortese), but a decided drive towards

experimentation, which can be observed in