Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci: The Hymn to Satan and the Chair at Bologna

In the mid-1860s a young Italian professor published a poem in praise of Satan — not the devil of the catechism but Satan as the spirit of reason, matter, rebellion and progress, roaring through the modern world with the force of a locomotive. *Inno a Satana* scandalised Catholic Italy and made its author notorious. Four decades later, in 1906, the Swedish Academy voted unanimously — a rare thing — to give him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first ever awarded to an Italian. The decision is still regarded as one of the least controversial in the prize's history.

A Carbonaro's Son in the Maremma

Carducci was born in 1835 at Val di Castello, near Pisa in Tuscany. His father was a physician and a Carbonaro — a member of the secret revolutionary societies that spent the first half of the nineteenth century conspiring against Italy's assorted foreign and clerical governments. The politics had consequences: the family moved repeatedly, and the boy grew up amid upheaval, much of it in the harsh, malarial Maremma country of the Tuscan coast, a landscape that recurs in his poetry as a kind of austere personal homeland.

He was raised on the Greek and Roman authors and on Dante and Alfieri, and he took his degree in philosophy and letters at the University of Pisa at twenty. That reading list is the whole man in miniature: classical antiquity, the Italian Middle Ages, and a taste for writers who hated tyrants.

Bologna

After teaching in secondary schools he was appointed to the chair of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, and he held it until his retirement in 1904 — more than four decades in a single post, from which he dominated Italian literary discussion for the rest of the century. He was that unusual combination, a genuine scholar and a genuinely popular poet: alongside the verse he produced something like twenty volumes of critical prose, including the *Studi letterari* of 1874. His first collection, *Rime*, appeared in 1857; *Levia Gravia* in 1868, mixing classical imitation with revolutionary sentiment.

What set him against his own generation was his refusal of Romanticism. While Italian poetry ran to the confessional and the medieval-picturesque, Carducci turned to classical antiquity for both his models and his politics, and his prestige at Bologna made that a national argument rather than a private preference.

The Hymn to Satan

*Inno a Satana* — written in 1863 and published a couple of years later, with sources differing on the exact date — was the great provocation of his early career. Its Satan is free thought itself, the patron of modern ideas, inventions and revolutions. Coming from a professor at a state university in a country that had just stripped the Pope of most of his territories, it was less a metaphysical statement than a political detonation, and it fixed Carducci's public identity as the poet of aggressive Italian anticlericalism.

The Barbarian Odes

His major poetic project was stranger and more technical. Beginning in 1873, Carducci set out to write Italian verse in the quantitative metres of Latin poetry — forms Italian is not built to accommodate — and called the results *Odi barbare*, the "barbarian odes," published in successive instalments in 1877, 1882 and 1889. He knew they would sound barbarous to a Roman ear; that was the point.

It is generally taken as his most influential work, and the reason it succeeded where most neoclassical verse fails is that the archaeology never smothered the feeling. Britannica's assessment is that he combined classical rigour with passionate intensity while avoiding the sterility that afflicts most attempts of the kind. Around the odes sit *Nuove poesie* (1873), the satirical political verses of *Giambi ed epodi* (1882), and the later *Rime nuove* and *Rime e ritmi*. Goethe and Heine were the modern presences behind the work.

The Senator

The fire-breathing republican mellowed into a national institution. Carducci served briefly as a deputy and was elected to the Senate in 1890. He resigned himself to constitutional monarchy, and by the mid-1890s had softened toward the Church — one account records a reconciliation with Catholicism in 1895, though Britannica maintains he remained fundamentally anticlerical to the end, which is probably the safer reading of a man whose whole style was combative.

When the Nobel came in 1906 it was on his ninth nomination; the novelist Antonio Fogazzaro had first put his name forward in 1902 and did so repeatedly thereafter. That year the Academy weighed fifty-four nominations across twenty-four writers, among them Tolstoy, Swinburne, Georg Brandes and Selma Lagerlöf. Carducci died on 16 February 1907, a few months after receiving it.

Why Giosuè Is Called a Genius

The distinctive capacity is fusion: Carducci was a philologist who could write, a poet whose scholarship fed his verse instead of embalming it. The Academy named exactly this, awarding the prize "not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces." Carl David af Wirsén, its permanent secretary, described a learned literary historian grounded in classical rather than romantic ideals, "a poet who is always moved by patriotism and a love of liberty," whose verse "attains a rare force." The Nobel biography calls him simply the greatest Italian literary figure of the later nineteenth century. Reviving quantitative metre in a language structurally hostile to it, and producing real poems rather than exercises, is a technical achievement almost nobody else has managed.

The honest counter-case is that very little of this survives translation, and that his standing outside Italy has collapsed. The barbarian metres are precisely the element that cannot cross a language barrier; strip them out and what remains can look like high-toned civic rhetoric, dense with classical allusion, addressed to a nineteenth-century Italian reader who no longer exists. He was a professor-poet, and the professorial habit — the demonstration, the polemic, the learned reference — is never far from the surface. The patriotism and love of liberty that Wirsén praised were the virtues of the Risorgimento; read forward into the twentieth century, Italian poetic nationalism went somewhere very dark, and Carducci's declamatory public manner was part of what D'Annunzio's generation inherited. And the 1906 award, unanimous as it was, was also another year in which Tolstoy was on the list and did not win.

Legacy

Carducci remains a fixed point in Italian education and a founding figure of modern Italian literary scholarship, the first Italian Nobel laureate and the man who kept a classical line running through a Romantic century. His anticlericalism helped define the culture of the new secular state; his criticism shaped how Italians read Dante and Petrarch for generations. Abroad he is now largely a name on a list of laureates — which is a fair measure of how much of a poet can be lost between languages, and how completely a reputation built on national argument can fade once the argument is over.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1906