Ada Negri's poetry underwent a gradual but steady evolution of style and content. Having gained immediate popularity with her early socialistic, humanitarian themes, through the use of a highly rhetorical language that evoked compassion for the daily miseries of the late-nineteenth century working class, Negri turned to more personal aspects. She explored her intimate feelings as a woman: as mother to her daughter and as a lonely and misunderstood wife who broke her marriage bonds and found fulfillment only in a late-blooming love that reconciled her with life. These deeply felt experiences changed her way of writing. From the declamatory, hurried style of her social poems, she moved to a more refined language, indicative not only of a better understanding of the world's ills but also of a more profound knowledge of literary elegance as practiced by the so-called decadent poets. Most, and by far the best, of...