Giorgio Bassani's reputation rests almost exclusively on the quality of his novels, even though he has been publishing poetry since 1947. This circumstance makes it difficult to contextualize Bassani's verse as does the tendency of critics to interpret that poetry from the perspective of its structural and thematic relationships with his prose. Also complicating the matter is the fact that Bassani's poetry does not often appear in anthologies of modern Italian poetry. Bassani's poems are interesting and coherent but generally fall short of breaking new ground or of producing a quintessential paradigm of the poetic modes that dominate the modern era. In other words his volumes written in the 1940s and 1950s reflect, parallel, and, to a degree, reinforce aspects of hermeticism and neorealism without achieving the status of definitive statements of either school. On the other hand Bassani's poems of the 1960s and 1970s do not significantly reflect...