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

barren attachment to the municipality, thus

becoming dependent upon Neapolitan

models in their literary output.

Even the dialect literature of Apulia has

been, until the aftermath of the Second

World War, imitative and repetitive. So that

we could certainly subscribe to what Pasolini

was saying in the remote 1952 in his

introductory essay to Poesia dialettale del

Novecento [Dialect Poetry of the Twentieth

Century], published by Guanda,

complaining about a belated Romanticism,

devoid of any polemical or realistic views,

notwithstanding the dramatic historical

events that have unfolded in the South from

the Seventeenth Century to the Unification,

and from then on until the middle of this

century. The last forty years, however, have

ushered in such great economic and social

changes (the demographic displacement,