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

language of “speech,” capable of bending to

all subjective needs (gnoseological,

psychological, lyrical...) and of favoring the

necessary development of the senses by

dilating the referential, timbric, rhythmic,

phonic potentials which contribute to

qualify poetic expression. Thus, dialects

aimed at progressively freeing themselves of

their onus of pure “speech” (little more than

“languages of nature”), and began to

transform themselves into true “languages

of culture,” while poets started to address

the codes with a neostilnovistic attitude that

would lead to neopetrarchan (but no longer

univocal) linguistic results. Hierarchies and

residual resistances fell; to the point that,

especially in the last two decades, not a

small number of poets, at times renouncing

it completely, at times occasionally setting it

aside, have substituted the common