ABSTRACT
Edoardo Sanguineti carves out an intermediate space between what are arguably the antipodes of the aesthetic spectrum: autonomous literature, 'art for art's sake', or 'pure poetry' on the one hand, and literature that is embedded in or reflective of society and history, on the other. The constant in Sanguineti's critical orientation is the devaluation of rhetoric in the name of what he perceives to be 'lyricized' lived experience. A useful place to begin to unpack the writer's critical apparatus is the anthology of twentieth-century poetry. Sanguineti views Aldo Palazzeschi and Guido Gozzano as pivotal figures in the growing awareness of the impossibility, or at least the implausibility, of a poetry that is subservient or obsequious with respect to traditions and utopias of bourgeois society. Sanguineti brings within the range of his hermeneutic radar aspects of virtually all modern Italian poetry.
