Interest in Dino Campana has been growing steadily, as evidenced by the proliferation of critical and biographical studies, to the extent that in 1989 alone four new editions of his Canti Orfici (1914; translated as Orphic Songs, 1968) were published, and there are those who are unabashedly calling Campana one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. But even independently of the merits of his poetry, Campana would remain one of the most striking, dramatic, and exciting figures of Italian literature, and certainly one of the most disputed and controversial.

Canti Orfici is of great interest for its innovative use of language, for its imaginative syntactical patterns, for its free mixture of verse and prose, for the creation of new lexical and semantic relationships, for the original way Campana appropriates preceding cultural experiences and uses them, and finally for the attention it has received from poets and critics alike. In...