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

the poetic experience in Italian.

On the one hand, then (to resume a

general classification of Romantic origin

which will for a long time retain some

validity), the popular imagination was

mined for material which could later be

returned to that same imagination,

exploiting the channels of verse

communication; on the other hand, there

was a tendency toward a manipulation

“other” of the same material, aiming at

communicating within higher, if not wider,

circuits. As a consequence, even languages

somehow tended to become differentiated:

along the popular line there was the more

explicit use of municipal “speech”

(vernaculars); in the other cases, less

differentiated grammatical results were

reached (at times with a “philological”

tendency to reconstruct the lexicon on the