ABSTRACT
Cesare Pavese addressed them to Constance Dowling, the American actress with whom he was involved in the months before his suicide in 1950, and they frame the sequence published posthumously as Verra la morte e avra i tuoi occhi. Pavese's knowledge of English showed to better effect when he wrote in Italian. The characters in Pavese's city poems are rootless, isolated in their bodies, jobs and bedsits. Pavese wrote his thesis at university on Walt Whitman, and said he 'admired and feared' Whitman's free verse. For the bulk of his own poetry, he adopted a tamed analogue of it: long, anapaestic four- or five-stress lines, unrhymed. The poems show them attempting to breach or blur these boundaries: starting a conversation with someone assumes a strange importance, as does going out for a stroll or having a fag-break; sex is viewed with adolescent feverishness.
