ABSTRACT
The critical authority still attributed to De Sanctis, together with the long-standing tradition of damning with faint praise the literary output of the academies, makes reassessing this output a challenge, and one that because arduous is rarely attempted. This chapter examines three collections of occasional poetry produced from within the Italian academies. The difficulties that post-Enlightenment criticism has with the occasional in literature are closely linked to ideas about aesthetics, on the one hand, and about the relationship between all forms of literature and reality, on the other. Poets and literary critics of the time reveal the conflict inherent in attempting to respect the long-standing and authoritative literary and linguistic model laid down by Bembo while also reflecting a different moral, social and linguistic climate. Any re-evaluation of the occasional poetry produced within the academies has to take into account the social function alongside any assessment of aesthetic value.
