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

The widespread practice of linguistic

creativity has shown that the poet's essential

need to render his inner discourse through a

language as much as possible “jealously

private,” “endophasic,”^9 can now be met by

dialectal languages, mature to the extent of

overcoming the risks of folkloric and

neonaturalistic relapses, as well as

neodecadent and romantic reversions.

The fact that characterizes the more

recent generations of poets in dialect springs

directly from these sources and is

emblematized in the search for an

expression which is as much as possible

original and makes it possible, at the same

time, to deal with even extremely modern

themes. Substantially, they have not allowed

themselves to be affected by the progressive

loss of “speakers” that has characterized the

course of dialect during the levelling