Sandro Penna | Biography

Together with Constantine Cavafy and Luis Cernuda, Sandro Penna is one of the twentieth century's finest poets on the subject of homosexual love. His homoerotic lyrics, dreamy and delicately unpornographic, are a supple blend of melancholy and exhilaration in the classical tradition; they re-create the tension between the real and the imaginative world of erotic experience. From the hermetic tradition, in whose hour of glory Penna emerged on the literary scene, he internalized the urgent personal tone of voice dear to its practitioners as well as their love of the epigram and the allusiveness of clarified imagery. Like the hermetic poets. Penna spurned the proverbial aulicita (courtly elegance) of long centuries of Italian literary history in a commitment to avoid preciosity; but, unlike them, he did not rejoice in the exalted notion of metaphor, taking the stuff of his poetry from the humble substance of his everyday life instead of...
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