Alfredo Giuliani's name is linked with I Novissimi: Poesie per gli anni '60 (The New Ones: Poetry for the Year 1960), an anthology he edited in 1961, which instantly caused so much turmoil in the Italian intellectual establishment that it was to change drastically the course of contemporary Italian poetry. Undoubtedly Giuliani's introduction to the five poets whose works make up the anthology (Elio Pagliarani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta, and Giuliani himself) represents one of the most daring and innovative statements of poetics to come out of postwar Italy. Giuliani's own poetry, from its beginnings, has constantly been guided by the necessity to explore new poetic paths in the attempt to overcome the limits of the sentimental, autobiographical character of a great part of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Starting in the early 1950s, mainly through his association with Luciano Anceschi, whose critical search for new literary expressions had led...