Diego Valeri represents a twentieth-century continuation of the classical lyric tradition in its purest form. Peripheral to contemporary ideological crises, his voice is imbued with the music and Arcadian imagery of Anacreon, Petrarch, Angelo Politian, and Giacomo Leopardi. Valeri's subject matter is nature and humankind, in love, melancholy, anguish, and struggle. He did not believe in tendentious poetry, yet, beneath the pristine and consistently metrical surface of Valeri's poems, one finds a stylistic complexity rich in moral intonations, qualifying Valeri as a poet of rectitude as well as melody and harmony.

Diego Valeri was born on 25 January 1887 in Piove di Sacco, between Padua and Venice. Among his important early readings was Petrarch's sonnet "Levommi il mio pensier in part ov'era." In 1909, after receiving a laurea (doctorate) in letters at the University of Padua, Valeri won a scholarship to the Sorbonne; he later returned to Italy to teach Italian...