Abstract

Recent literary criticism has made a serious attempt to place the poetic voice of Dino Campana within the European cultural context of the early twentieth century. Focusing on an analysis of the Canti Orfici, I treat the principal poetic and philosophical themes taken up by Campana. Resuming the historical and cultural background out of which twentieth-century Orphism emerged, I first analyze the artistic avant-guard of the late Nineteenth-Century in order to highlight the influence of their language upon the language of poetry. Moving from Apollinaire, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, I reconstruct the orphic interpretation given by Gerard de Nerval and Stephane Mallarme whose orphic destiny is characterized by themes of wandering and madness, as well as a high quality of poetic musicality. A deep and infinite silence resounds in this musicality: the silence of the night in which vibrates the world-soul reborn to a new life. ;Campana's Orphism appears distinctly through three dominant motifs: evasion, the descent into the heart of things, and the reactivation of truth through memory. Orphic poetry evinces a concern with delving into the heart of reality, an operation absorbing mystical and existentialist suggestions and presupposing the critique of an all-too-often rigidified and contaminated appearance. The following lessons prove significant for better defining this particular actualization of the Orphic myth: the demystifying thought of Nietzsche taught through the paradoxes of Zarathustra, the insights offered by Bergson's theory of duree and simultaneite, and Freud's discovery of the dynamics of the unconscious. This dissertation examines the manner in which these motifs recur in the poetry of the Canti Orfici, and how the translation of these motifs into lyric resolves itself within a wholly musical and symbolic dimension. The relation of Campana's poetry with European culture, even if subterranean, leads us to recognize the important role played by the Canti Orfici in the renovation of Italian lyric achieved by assimilating the genius of language and its mytho-poietic nature