Ardengo Soffici's significant contribution to Italian letters is attributed almost exclusively to the innovative works in which the author moved away from traditional literary forms and evolved a freer and more original style of his own. His role as innovator of poetic language was most pronounced between 1908 and 1915, the years during which writers, philosophers, and literary critics were fashioning modern conceptions of life and of artistic expressive modes in Italy. The epochal journals Leonardo, La Voce, and Lacerba, which succeeded one another during those years, testify to the engaging socioethical, philosophical, and artistic principles discussed during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Toward the end of this period, in 1915, Soffici produced his most avant-garde works. After 1915, however, he reverted to a conservative ideology. Consequently, in some of his later works, he returned to the closed, traditional forms that characterized his earliest writings. The antimomies of the twentieth...