ABSTRACT
Modern and contemporary Italian poetry continues to fill our bookshelves. No other foreign poetry has recently benefited as much from the efforts of translators, who have produced not just samplings, but thick “Selected Poems” and even “Complete Poems.” Annotated and bilingual, several of these volumes also possess excellent introductions situating the poet with respect to Hermeticism—the most influential Italian poetic sensibility in the twentieth century—and other European literary movements and philosophies, especially those that have held sway in France. Italian poets have long engaged in dialogue with their neighbors across the Alps; and not a few have also been attentive to German-language culture, notably to the psychoanalysis of early-twentieth-century Vienna or to the aesthetic implications of Martin Heidegger’s readings of Trakl, Rilke, and Holderlin.
