Dino Campana and "La poesia Toscana che fu"

Abstract

"La Verna", the second of the Canti orfici's extended prose poems, is central to an understanding of Dino Campana's poetics. On its surface an account of the poet's pilgrimage to the ancient Franciscan monastery of La Verna, high in the mountain wilderness of the Casentino, "La Verna" may also be read as a symbolic journey back to the origins of Italian poetry. His encounter with the Tuscan poetry and art of the past served as the foundation for the new poetics of "purezza" that he would expound and practice in the Canti Orfici. This "truly new art", proposed by Campana sheds significant light both on the poet's relations with the dominant cultural institutions of his era and on his position in twentieth-century Italian literature.