Giuseppe Ungaretti

The Man of Summer

Aug 15, 2023

The following piece is the first piece of what will be Christian Poets of WWI, a series on several of the poets who were involved, in varying degrees, in the First World War. Many of the poets from this time period are well-known, or at least one or two of the poems they wrote, but few of us know well the poets’ stories or even the works of the lesser-known poets, who, while less influential, show us small but invaluable glimpses into one of the strangest and darkest times in the history of mankind. While short, each piece will serve to introduce a concise, and hopefully edifying, biography of these poets, as well as to inspire and enable the reader to engage with the poet’s work on the reader’s own time. To know the facts of history is to know the bare minimum; to know the poetry of history is to know the heart of history. “Cor ad cor loquitur.”

In a 1963 interview with F. Camon, the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti exclaimed, “I am the man of summer…the season that devours everything!” The season that devours everything? Reading that, I thought, “Really? The summer? Isn’t it more apt to say that autumn is the season that devours everything?” Ungarett’s words, here, however, illustrate a fundamental aspect of his poetic view of the world. For him, to “devour everything” like the summer means to swallow the environment whole like the summer heat, and to indulge in the thick and infinite mystery of human experiences; to be a man of the summer is to buzz with the warm, living, and pervasive pulse of the summer that we feel in mid-July. What kind of man is the man of the summer?

Born in the thick heat of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1888 to Italian parents, Giuseppe Ungaretti spent most of his childhood in North Africa. Only two years later, in 1890, his father died in a digging accident while working on the Suez Canal. His widowed mother then ran a bakery to support the family on her own. While raised as a Catholic, Ungaretti would forgo his Christian faith as a young adult only to return to it later in his life in 1928 after a spiritual crisis (it usually takes a crisis to shake us from complacency). In 1912, in his mid-twenties, he moved to Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne under the likes of Henri Bergson.

It was during the time before the Great War that he began to meet the avant-garde painters and poets of his day—the Cubists, the Surrealists, and the Futurists. While not restricted to any of these camps, and while he was ultimately opposed to their modi operandi, he was influenced by each of them. Writer and translator Andrew Frisardi writes,

“Like all of the most talented modernists, Ungaretti was as much at odds with the avant-garde as he was part of it. He was iconoclastic only to the extent that cultural detritus and insincere formalism were in the way of reality. The essence of language…could be rediscovered only by starting over again with its basic units: the syllable, word, or phrase. Ungaretti was separated from his Futurist and Crepuscular peers by his moral seriousness and philosophical fervor: [Ungaretti writes] ‘While I did not use the word except when it came to me infused with moral content, they…asked nothing of the word but a physical impressionability.’”

Ungaretti was so committed to the moral infusion and meaning of certain words that, according to some who knew him well, he would spend significant time agonizing over which word purported the simplest and purest meaning available to the reality of what he sought to express. He always distinguished between vocabulo, the literal meaning of a word, and parola, “a words ineffable essence.” His poetry always made use of parola, which allowed for fewer words and richer poetic ambiguity.

A major reason for this brevity in style seems to have come from his experience in trench warfare, which awoke him in an existential way to the ineffable essence of life. In 1915, Ungaretti moved to Milan, Italy, where he was mobilized in the Italian army to fight under Mussolini on the Northern Italian theater. It was during his time in the trenches that he first wrote the poems that would be compiled into his first collection. Many of the poems were only one or two lines quickly scrawled on scrap paper and they carried a primordial simplicity and weight to them akin to the primordial experiences of war. His war collection was first published as Il porto sepolto, “The Buried Port,” in 1917; this same collection was later republished in 1919 as Allegria di Naufragi, “The Joy of Shipwrecks,” then again in 1931 simply as L’Allegria, or “Joy.” Not the most applicable title for a collection of poems written in the trenches of WWI, is it?

Having an educational background in philosophy, there is a strong philosophical underpinning to Ungaretti’s poetry. However, speaking specifically of L’Allegria, Ungaretti claimed that it, “Does not just concern philosophy, it concerns a concrete experience from a childhood passed in Alexandria and necessarily intensified, embittered, deepened and crowned by the 1914-1918 war.” Poet and writer Paola Carroni explains,

“In Ungaretti we don't find struggle, disgust, scenes of horror and blood, characteristic of the British World War I poetry (think about Owen, Graves, Sassoon), but rather restraint, avoidance of details and the discovery of something unexpected, of men, the universe and one's own soul.”

Unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, Ungaretti’s poetry may have used the war for poetic material, but it was not ultimately concerned with the horrors of war itself and instead sought to recall man’s Edenic innocence and to seek universal brotherhood (even though he was sympathetic to Mussolini and the Italian fascist regime).

At root, however, Ungaretti was ultimately a classical man. Two of his greatest role models within the Western canon were Shakespeare and Petrarch, and the image of the pieta fascinated him, especially after his return to the Catholic faith. In his view, the classical perspective would always be a safeguard against solipsism and aesthetic decadence, and his humanistic tendencies put him directly at odds with the French surrealists of his day and with Freudian reductionism, which was in vogue. Ungaretti would go on to become the father of hermeticism—a name that was born out of criticism for his poetry since many saw it as too obscure. Although Ungaretti was adamant that he was not purposefully obscure, his conception of poetry was intensely personal, and it became less and less hermetic in style as he grew older. Perhaps such criticism stands justified. Or, perhaps, people of winter simply failed to understand the alleged man of summer.

I cling to this wounded tree

forsaken in this sinkhole

that feels as dull

as a circus

before or after the show

and I watch

the calm passage

of clouds across the moon

This morning I stretched out

in an urn of water

and like a relic

rested

The Isonzo as it flowed

polished me

like one of its stones

I lifted

my bones

and walked out

“My Rivers,” L’Allegria (translated from Italian)

Giuseppe Ungaretti

The Man of Summer

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