Content area
Full Text
ACCORDING TO ROGER ASSELINEAU, Dino Campana (1885-1932), author of the collection Canti Orfici [Orphic Songs] (1914),1 was the Italian poet most influenced by Walt Whitman.2 Yet, the connections between these poets have not been thoroughly explored nor have critics assessed the implications of Campana's decision to take Leaves of Grass with him in 1907, when he left from Genoa on a ship for Argentina in what would become his transformative journey to South America.3
Campana-who has been regarded (and perhaps stereotypically stigmatized) as the Italian poète maudit par excellence, because of his mental illness,4 his extravagant and rebellious ways of living, his turbulent social interactions, and the explosive power of his poetic voice-was, with this journey, abandoning himself once again to the roaming life that he deeply loved. But this time the poet was going much farther than on previous sojourns to Paris, or Switzerland, or Mount of La Verna in the Tuscan Apennines, which he loved to climb and get lost in for weeks. This time, Campana was going far away to start a new life in the American hemisphere that he had encountered through the words of Whitman, so it was fitting to bring Leaves of Grass along. With reference to his journeys and experiences in South America, Campana wrote with a mythopoetical and very Whitmanian perception of the American landscape and its imminent potential (especially in the poems "Journey to Montevideo," "Pampas," "A Trolley Ride to America and Back," "Dualism," and in the early draft of "Pampas," "The Fiery Train on the Tawny Pampas").5 These poems can be read as Campana's creative response to Whitman's idea of "America" as the source of an extra-European newness, freedom, and regeneration. For Campana, just as for Whitman, to be a poet in "America" and of "America" meant to move toward modernity and experimentation, to embody a bardic voice that sings a future land of equality and democracy, to pursue a personal, social, political, and also creative liberation.6
Dino Campana represented a figure of radical alterity within the context of the avant-gardist Italian literary scene of his time-a scene that he repeatedly and desperately tried to enter, but also a scene from which he naturally stood out because of his highly idiosyncratic manner, characterized by a...