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

earnestness shown in his Italian poetry,

raising it to very high levels. Versification is

always subjected to a rhythmic and metrical

control that entails precise stylistic and

lexical choices, which give form to the

substance of the images in the

representa¬tion of a world which is private,

but tends to unfold in the interpretive key of

collective consciousness, regional or

provincial as it may be, but aiming at

becoming emblematic of a universal

condition. In this sense the recovery or even

the invention of an archaic language, which

includes speech and at the same time goes

beyond it, making possible the erasure of all

the trite topoi recurring in the vernacular

tradition, allows the poet to choose words

capable of expressing a world of events and

objects, of feelings and reflections which,

going through the psyche, reaches the