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

same “idioms,” revisited in their original

forms, either by reclaiming the traditional

textual tradition, or with some imaginative

contamination that further allowed effects of

antiliterary linguistic expressionism.).

Not an easy path to follow, then, which

met with different applications over a rather

fragmented territory, above all

linguistically.^4 And if the lessons arising

from the culture of naturalistic realism

seemed to prevail, there were also those of

decadent origin which consented the

recovery of a melancholy, sentimental

Romanticism, elegiac and georgic, and the

related expressions of the lyrical self with

excursions into melody. So that one could go

from pure mimesis to forms of more

elaborate expression in search of the

cantabile, if with a popular taste only rarely

abandoned.