For these writers, Futurism was above all a school of freedom and they gave them much more than they did not receive any. For others it was a short episode in their literary career, an art experiment that led them to better find themselves in forms descending from the old romanticism. The sensational apostle of Futurism in a certain period of his activity was Giovanni Papini, whose intellectual life must be interpreted and judged in itself, beyond any school constraint. Restless spirit and troubled by an anxiety of painful mysticism, endowed with an extraordinary vigor of assimilation and reaction and in need of ruminating and remaking within himself the fluctuating world of contemporary thought, instinctively led to abstractions and conceptual constructions and greedy of clear and resolute positions, with books and magazines he was one of the most fervent agitators and propagators of ideas in the first decades of the new century; combative opponent of insincerity, of refined elegance, of vague doctrinalism, advocate and advocate “of fact, of certain knowledge, of simple and symmetrical theories, of harsh philosophy”. Papini’s fame is more than poetry. recommended to the prose which, happy mixture of chosen traditionalism and lively Tuscan character, winds its agile and robust in the bitter and passionate confessions ofFinite man , in pugnacious pages of literary and philosophical criticism and in works on historical subjects, interesting perhaps only because they were pervaded by his unstoppable autobiographical lyricism.
According to Plus-Size-Tips.com, futurist in Electric Poems and Rarefactions , Corrado Govoni, after some hesitation, found the shape of his imaginative, rude individuality, a lover of descriptive detail in the Inauguration of spring and in the Notebook of dreams and stars . Thus Luciano Folgore from the futurism of the song of motors, he moved on to the good-natured and almost benevolent irony of his parodies, which counterfeit modern poets. Which either tired or ironic or melancholy or slightly humorous vision of the human world, in forms of plain domestic simplicity, which either escape the constraints of the meter or shatter the verse, had announced from afar, already in the face of futurism, Vittorio Betteloni, a fresh poet from modest, anecdotal and familiar inspirations, and a good translator of the gentle Goethian idyll Arminio and Dorotea, and Ceccardo Roccatagliata, who, when he is not favored by literary attitudes, sings softly the melancholy of the deserted aspirations for a renewal of life; and the so-called “crepuscular” that had flourished in the decade before the war had made the noble object of their poetry. Among which we should mention Sergio Corazzini, who loves and sings the simple life of things and men, the sobs of the barrel organs, with the accentuation of a melancholy presaging of near death, and Guido Gozzano, the most significant of the group , which in a modest and almost slouching air, expresses the poetry of tenuous and common things, blurred images of the past, disconsolate and faded memories, dreams destroyed by the irony of reality. And with the crepuscular, Francesco Gaeta, a musical poet of indefinite sadness, could also be sent. Younger, if not of age, of artistic maturity, and therefore different from the previous ones also in the technical processes, then came Arturo Onofri, a strong poet of a nuanced descriptive fragmentism and fantastic dreams; Umberto Saba, inspired by a subtle melancholy that spreads from man to things, Giuseppe Ungaretti, the poet of short fragmentary notations, thickening in a sentence, in a word, meditated impressions; Diego Valeri, a good translator of French poets and, in his original work, a well disciplined poet of delicate emotions, in simple and colorful forms between twilight and impressionist; Giovanni Titta Rosa, pleasant narrator and fine engraver of lyrical impressions of nature; Eugenio Montale, with precise, hard, sharp images in landscapes taken as a symbol of the soul in spiritualized visions, Ugo Betti, delicate poet,
If futurism, which had raged in the five or six years preceding the war, had gradually moderated its excesses, and had ended up muting its thunderous instruments and his effort to renew art and life at the same time, a more disciplined conception of art, better conforming to the Italian literary tradition, was implemented by some older poets, who, silent for a long time, happily renewed their vein after the war world-wide: Pietro Mastri, who in free and traditional forms elaborates in the Via delle stelle subtle autobiographical introspections, and Vincenzo Gerace (1876-1930), creator of a poetic world of uncommon depth; and he affirmed himself in the doctrine and in the practice of art of some young people, cooperators of the Round, a magazine lived from 1919 to 1923, which without renouncing the real conquests of freedom and modernity made by the most recent literary schools, began to fight their excesses and extravagances, everything sloppy, shapeless, rhetorical, mediocre they had produced, trying to bring art back to balance, precision, the decorum of style, in short, that sense of form which, an unfailing legacy of the centuries, the Rondists found exquisitely expressed in Leopardi’s prose and poems. They were with others, among those young people, Vincenzo Cardarelli, founder of the magazine, lyricist and prose writer of composed originality; Emilio Cecchi, original figure of the pen artist born of the thinker and critic, nourished by Italian and foreign culture, dense, precise, colorful ( Pesci rossi , 1920; The bad weather tavern , 1927; Something , 1932; Mexico , 1932); Antonio Baldini, who in his war book Nostro Purgatorio and in Michelaccio gave form in pages of limpid and frank prose to the fine wit of his spirit, posed as an indulgent irony towards the things of the world; Riccardo Bacchelli, who from the irony of Lo sa il tuna , moved on to the narration between fantastic and historical in the Diavolo al Pontelungo and in Oggi tomorrow e mai , and to the historical-critical narrative, acute and penetrating, in the Conspiracy of Don Giulio d’Este , writer of singular clarity and evidence.
