SOURCE: “Creator of Poetic Myths,” in Ugo Foscolo, Twayne Publishers, 1970, pp. 107-24.

In the following essay, Radcliff-Umstead traces the various evolutionary stages of Foscolo's unfinished poem The Graces, and discusses how the fragments illustrate the poet's views on artistic expression and contemporary events and figures, as well as how it fuses modern and mythic elements.

After completing Of Tombs, Foscolo considered composing several ambitious verse projects. A letter to Monti of December 12, 1808, lists the subjects of his proposed series of Italian hymns. In a poem to be entitled Alceus (Alceo), he intended to trace the history of Italian literature since the fall of the Byzantine Empire; a fragment of this work became the Hymn to the Ship of the Muses. Nothing remains of the projected composition “To the Eponian Goddess,” where Foscolo planned to celebrate the glory of equestrian arts in time of war and peace. The author...