Pier Paolo Pasolini Critical Essay | Critical Essay by T. O'Neill

SOURCE: "Pier Paolo Pasolini's Dialect Poetry," in Forum Italicum, Vol. IX, No. 4, December, 1975, pp. 343-67.

In the following essay, O'Neill traces the influences, themes, and stylistic devices of Pasolini's dialect poetry.

Perhaps the best synthesis of the world of Pasolini's dialect poetry is that given, unconsciously, by the author himself in the important 1952 essay on La poesia dialettale del Novecento, talking of the Triestine poet, Giotti:

Una povera storia, infinitamente più nuda e deserta che nei crepuscolari, poiché nella sua angoscia non c'è compiacimento o ripensamento da favola decadente, ma come un interno terrore, una nozione della morte e del disfacimento del mondo, delle cose care e degli affetti, che ha quasi un remoto accento leopardiano.

The "mondo" of which Pasolini speaks is that of Friuli, specifically Casarsa, the birthplace of his mother, to where his family had been evacuated in 1943, and where he remained...
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