Essential character of Italian literature in the first thirty years of the century. XX is a spirit of reaction to that tendency, which manifested itself in the last decades of the XIX, which seemed to hint at a degeneration (back in the centuries) of the sense of form – a precious achievement of a classical education many times secular – in the study of renewal or imitation of forms. Reaction therefore to Carduccianism and D’Annunzio in what was transient in the work of the masters and became a way in the imitators: the erudite reconstruction of syntactic and metric forms, the search for exquisite refinements and peregrinity of language and style, the philological cult of the past in history, in myth, in legend. And the motion, as usually happens with every reaction, was violent and sometimes senseless, so as to provoke other reactions that are also excessive. Hence, despite having achieved reasonable temperaments of exaggerated doctrines and practices of art, Italian literature today oscillates between different starts and attempts experiences in which it is perhaps the germ of a new equilibrium.
Prepared by Giovanni Papini’s Leonardo and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese ‘s Hermes , La Voce was published in Florence from 1908 to 1915 , a magazine that stirred up youthful ideas in every field of spiritual and practical life with impetus and sincerity: in philosophy rather American than French, not without taking part in the new Italian idealism; in literature and art, fighting rhetorical, academic and professional traditionalism; in politics, dealing with social, economic and cultural problems with an avant-garde spirit. He broke into the Voice that same aspiration, still incomplete nor well aware of its aims, for a revitalization and renewal in the seriousness and concreteness of Italian life, which in the same years generated nationalism in politics (and it does not matter that the political tone of the Voice was radical ) and in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, futurism. The group of young people who had created and nurtured the Florentine magazine split up little by little in the clarification that within that fervor of concordant and disagreeing theoretical activities: in 1912 he directed La Voce il Papini, who then founded and until 1915 he directed Lacerba , organ of futurism, while the Voice followed, literary, under the direction of Giuseppe De Robertis, and Prezzolini, the first director of the Voce , published (1914-1915) an exclusively political Voce .
According to Picktrue.com, the Futurist movement had come from Lombardy and had been its initiator since 1908 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, eccentric author of prose and verse in French and Italian, who had raised, he and his followers, a great noise with the posters, with the conferences , which often ended in vulgar noises, with art exhibitions; sensational apparatus intended to spread the doctrine and the taste of the school. Declared enemy of everything that came from the past, beauties of art, historical traditions, habits of thought, feeling, life, glorifier of energy, violence, struggle, futurism wanted art to ask for inspiration from modernity industrial mechanical lightning, and renewed his means of expression, starting in war, as regards the literary art, against the traditional language and grammar, breaking up the period in short breaths, isolating the images, resorting to onomatopoeias of pure sound, to signs extraneous to the common alphabet, to the hermetic eloquence of white spaces, throwing words freely out of syntactic links, breaking every meter constraint in the free verse. Extravagance in large part, he intended to shock the good public; under which, however, a substance of doctrine was hidden, which enlarged the subject of art and made forms more and more responsive to the internal dictation where the true yeast of poetry was. More traditionalist than it did not want to be, Futurism took up and intensified, in the strangeness of the titles, in the scientific technicality of the images, in the mania of onomatopoeias, intentions, efforts, habits of the old seventeenth century.
As always happens, not by virtue of the school, but thanks to the intimate lyricism of their soul, they left the ranks of the futurist writers who before and during the world war gave Italian literature works not unworthy of memory. The last heir of the Milanese scapigliatura, Giampietro Lucini almost personifies the bond that binds romanticism to futurism; exuberant, disordered, unstable genius, declared adversary of D’Annunzio’s art, author of a volume of verses, futurist at least in the title, Revolverate , and yet sometimes fantastic creator of a sweetly idyllic world. Painter and poet, Ardengo Soffici, who was the theorist of futurism, manages to give the fragmentary impressions portrayed in his first books ( Arlecchino , Giornale di) the sense of an energetic and singular fantastic life and to reveal to you an artist’s soul seriously thoughtful of the problems of life, which, having overcome the prejudices of futurism and increasingly approaching the Italian technical tradition with originality of spirit, he manifests, in Lemmonio Boreo novel , in his war books and in the prose and verse writings of the postwar period. In Aldo Palazzeschi, who appeared as the school’s corifeo, the servants to doctrine sometimes fix the impressions in the rigidity of the snapshot, forbidding them to spiritualise themselves; but elsewhere, in his more characteristic poems and in that original novel which is The Code of Perelà, fresh images out of the imagination in their naive nudity clearly express the poet’s individuality with his brooding and melancholy seriousness, with his jaunty hilarity, with his unscrupulous boredom of so-called good customs and social conventions.
