Neometrical meditations. Some remarks on the return of closed metrical forms in the italian contemporary poetry.

Abstract

This paper aims to put in light some aspects of the metrical renaissance in the Italian contemporary poetry, starting from some poetical works, published in the first half of the Eighties, which reintroduced closed metrical forms, both taken from Italian ancient tradition (like sonnets, ballads, tercets etc.) and created ex novo. In particular, the article analyzes the work of two twentieth-century “ancestors” of the neo-metrical school, Edoardo Cacciatore and Toti Scialoja, pinpointing their possible influence on poets of a younger generation like Patrizia Valduga, Marco Ceriani and Tommaso Ottonieri. A larger space is dedicated here to the figure of Gabriele Frasca, an artist with great technical skills who has been able, in the whole course of his career, to put togheter tradition and innovation, displaying at the same time an uncommon knowledge of poetry theoretical problems. Finally, this paper tries to define the concepts of mannerism, “metrical awareness” and “metric as symbolic form”, and also to put the birth of neometrical school in the context of the poetry crisis and the simultaneous amazing development of mass media which took place in Italy during the Seventies.