Nobel Prize 1906 for Literature

REASON: for his deep critical research, for the freshness of style, for the lyrical strength that characterizes most of his masterpieces.

Giosuè Carducci was born in Valdicastello, hamlet of Pietrasanta, in Versilia, on 27 July 1835 The poet- to be inherited the civil ideals and the passion for literature from his father, Michele Carducci, municipal doctor who was  uspected  of Carbonari’s association by grand- ducal authority.

He also inherited anti clericalism that will be one of the few constants  in his political parabola, from the republican ambition when he was young  to the senile rhetoric exaltation of Savoy monarchy, Carducci spent his childhood in the Maremma around Pisa, later was sent to Florence at the Piarists where, under the guide of Father Geremia Bersettini, he received his first literary formation later perfected at the Scuola Normale of Pisa  where he graduated in Italian Literature in 1856.

He stopped teaching in grand-ducal lyceums because of his political creeds and he was called to hold the chair of Italian Literature at the University in Bologna by the Minister of Education of the first Italian government and he remained  there  for the rest of his life. He died on 17 February 1907.

Carducci’s anticlericalism, a steady note in his poetry and in his political creeds, was fed with factors that ranged from resentment against the Pope because his opposition to the unity of Italy, to the influence exerted from French historians (Michelet, Proudhon, Quinet), to the influence of Positivism that dominated  the world of science in  the poet’s maturity. Such a collection of  different readings and personal experiences determined  his position that alternated  from anticlericalism and open denigration of Christianity derided because considered   enemy force constitutionally against any progress of civilisation  and blamed as a disruptor of classical civilization. Carducci anticipates a cultural policy of fascism with his tendency to make  tabula  rasa of all humanistic evolution conditioned by  Christianity and to restore roman traditions in contrast with the asserted barbarism.

However Carducci’s influence in the Italian literature was in some aspects positive because it represented a realistic reaction against a late Romanticism full of affectation. Particularly the classicism of the Tuscan poet revalues that sense of humanity of Renaissance that Romanticism had neglected, He also  asserts the value of naturalism, of full sensuality,of a life rude and sincere. In this contest is situated the asserted  paganism of Carducci that can be traced back to a vision of nature loved not as an individual and subjective symbol but in its strength.

The image of a pagan world pursued by the poet of Valdicastello is paradoxically the ideal proposed by the late German romantic literature and by the French Parnassian poets (Banville, Hédédia, Leconte de Lisle). Carducci didn’t realize how that image was distorted but he didn’t use the pagan world as a pretext to refuse his contemporary life and seclude himself. On the contrary he wanted to be the bard of the memories and ambitions of the Italian people. That aspiration was true but over rhetorical so his poems never reach the  lyrical pathos and the civil passion like, for example Parini and Alfieri.

The cycle of his poetry begins in his young years with a strong reaction against the old academism of late Romanticism dominant in grand ducal Tuscany  and ends paradoxically with the consolidation of a fanatically patriotic and classicist academic style that will be continued by Pascoli and D’Annunzio and will be a pretext of the aesthetics of fascism.

Carducci’s collection of poems are six: “Juvenilia”, “Levia Gravia”, “Giambi and Epodi”, ”New rimes”, “Barbarian odes”, “Rimes and Rhythms”.