[On first reading Ungaretti's poetry,] I was greatly moved by his delicate poetic sensibility, by the aesthetic beauty of his immaterial forms which seemed to belong austerely to "pure poetry," by the masterly technical elaboration with which he combined deeply moving emotions and situations. Parallel to this was the absence of every device of rhetoric of inflation. Instead, I found a classical brevity, a condensation achieved by masterful dexterity, which gave to his poems the impression of musical epigrams….

In the genius of Ungaretti, and in the new form which he was giving to the Italian lyric, I met something unprecedented, a renovation syncronized with new directions. (p. 616)

[I have read] Ungaretti, though a victim of his age, nevertheless represented the transition from a rhetorical and lyrical babbling to an austere and laconic style. Even so, this theory goes, Ungaretti had achieved nothing more than an "infertile formalism...