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

still to be “recognized” in every sense,

would eventually confine local culture in the

net of a unidirectional process, substantially

monolithic, even in the diversity of

experiences, of private struggles and

elaborations, of the styles and inspirations of

the poets of the first dialect season (1920-35)

who, with the exception of Eugenio Cirese,

the most committed of all, and Luigi

Antonio Trofa, an “irregular” who was

responsive to the stimulus of a “modernism”

still to be tested, can certainly be placed

within the confines of a mimetic verismo,

functionally adherent to a singular historical

moment of the Molisan province,

characterized, as noted earlier, by the

expansion of a centripetal energy that

excluded any sort of opening toward

external literary models, urban and

cosmopolitan, though such models were