MONDALE, UNGARETTI, CUAJIMONDO, and SAMBA are the ones who will change, in the twentieth century, the landscape of Italian poetry. Although they are members of the same movement, which will confront traditional rhetoric head-on, they often hold diametrically opposed views on significant intellectual issues that concern the era or the art.

Rhetoric, hermeticism, the relationship between poetry and history, committed art, the irrational element in poetry, the poem as an object: these are the fundamental issues addressed in the texts of this volume, which undoubtedly played a significant role in the intellectual history of the neighboring country.

Moreover, what emerges in these texts is an element of invulnerable and agonizing intellectual effort by the poet to define their art in relation to the world and history. Texts, above all, connected with great poems of European literature – which gives them a unique interest.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]