Il Novecento inglese e italiano: Saggi critici e comparativi. Udine, It. Campanotto. 1998. 503 pages. L.60,000. ISBN 88- 456-0083-1.

Brown, John L.

This "heavyweight" volume, with the pretentious title Il Novecento... (The Twentieth Century, English and Italian: Critical and Comparative Essays), promises more than it gives. All the texts date from the period 1960 to 1998, although no reason is given for this particular periodization. And considering the importance of American poetry and criticism throughout the "Novecento," the designation "Anglo-American" would have been more accurate than simply "English," especially since the preface states that "the principal figures" in the collection are "Pound, Eliot, Montale, Luzi, Solmi, and F. R. Leavis." The editors assert that they "knew them personally for years," but neither Pound nor Eliot gives any confirmation of such a close relationship in their correspondence.

G. Singh, a professor at Indian universities, in Belfast, and in Milan, is currently a colleague of Mario Luzi at the University of Urbino. He has published numerous volumes of criticism, as well as five volumes of poetry, three of which bear prefaces by Luzi. Barfoot, Professor of English at the University of Trieste, contributed thirteen of the thirty-five essays in the volume, which consists of four sections. The first contains nine texts in Italian and English, all devoted to Pound and Eliot; among them are "Il Dante di E. Pound," "Pound's Criticism," "Eliot and Dante," and "Il Dante di T. S. Eliot." (The reader soon becomes aware of the constant repetition.) The second part (fifteen essays) deals largely with relations between Italian and English and American poetry, with Singh contributing seven essays-on Byron, Hardy, F. R. Leavis, Ungaretti, and Solmi. Among Barfoot's texts here are "Wordsworth Today," "Dante and Thomas Hardy," and "Pound and Thomas Hardy." Part 3 offers six essays, five by Singh (on Eliot, Luzi, Leavis, Gargiulo, and Solmi) plus Barfoot's analysis of "Pound's conception of a literary review." The fourth section has four texts by Singh (on Eliot and Bertrand Russell, on Montale and "the revolution of the word," on Tagore, on Philip Larkin) and four by Barfoot (devoted to Wordsworth, to translations of Leopardi by Pound and Robert Lowell, and to Stephen Spender).

Only four of the essays are being published here for the first time. All the others have appeared in various relatively little-known periodicals, Italian and Indian, such as the Alighart Critical Miscellany. Thanks to the cooperation of a modest provincial Italian publishing house in Udine, the essays are now available to a few more readers, although many of them, especially those concerning Pound and Eliot (the subjects of some eighteen of the thirty-five essays), deal with writers and topics that have already been treated abundantly, indeed more than abundantly, for over half a century. The work is copiously documented, although the bibliographies and notes are somewhat disordered and outdated. For example, Stock's biography of Pound (1970) is cited rather than Humphrey Carpenter's authoritative study which appeared in 1988.

As we have seen, Pound and Eliot are the dominating figures in the work, but the invariably flattering comments on both rarely if ever propose anything that has not been said a number of times before. Singh defends Pound against accusations of having been a Fascist: "he simply had an utopian admiration for the social reforms of Mussolini." He suggests that Pound's criticism should be recognized as having "greater subtlety and penetration" than that of any other poet and that his translations (as Barfoot asserts as well) "occupy a unique place in the history of modern literature." (Here, as elsewhere, the editor-authors indulge in their weakness for the superlative!) Singh calls our attention to Pound's sponsorship of Ungaretti, the wild and uncontrollable "Unga," who created a stir at the University of Oklahoma when he came (in 1970) to accept the very first Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The numerous lyrical outbursts chanting the praise of Pound sound like a canonization of "Uncle Ez of Idaho," the patron saint of Il Novecento. His disciple, Eliot, is the runner-up, and as with Pound, practically every text emphasizes his relation to Dante. Barfoot asserts that "of the two most important twentieth- century poets in English"-Pound and Eliot-Eliot is "the most Dantesque in spirit," his admiration for Dante expressed in his "ardently felt need to embrace a certain form of Europeanism."

In the area of twentieth-century Italian poetry, the editors have selected Montale, Ungaretti, Solmi, Luzi, Gargiulo, Leopardi (in translations by Pound and Eliot), and "Ligurian poets of Ossi di sepia." The absence of Pasolini is to be regretted. Among "the English," we find Wordsworth, Hardy, Spender, Leavis, and Larkin, but Pound and Eliot reign supreme. Robert Lowell is mentioned principally as a translator of Leopardi, and Singh praises his fellow Indian, Tagore. He also describes Larkin as an artist "timido, reservato, e fertilmente triste." Spender reached a wider audience than did the withdrawn Larkin, because, as Singh remarks, his "best poems are extremely clear." Barfoot condemns this "clarity" as "pseudopoetic journalism." Other British poets receiving passing notice include C. Day Lewis, Auden, Binyon, Robert Bridges, Browning, and Hopkins. Yeats, the only Irish poet represented, is treated in Singh's "Yeats and Thomas Hardy" and is frequently referred to elsewhere.

In closing this overloaded, repetitious volume, the reader may well recall Valery Larbaud's warning to the writer "not to heap up the plate." Sound advice, which the author-editors of Il Novecento have defiantly disregarded.

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.