In the panorama of twentieth-century Italian poetry, the work of Giorgio Caproni represents a centrifugal force with respect to official trends. He was more responsive to the Italian literary tradition in its entirety than to a particular school of his time. Nevertheless, Caproni's poetry is embedded in contemporary experience; it is aimed at answering everyday existential and ethical questions as well as searching for poetical forms adequate to express such questions. He was a poet who looked beyond and over the various poetical trends and schools of his time; he leaned on the solid foundations of Italian literary tradition in order to restore it in a fragmentary mode for the modern reader's taste.

Born in Leghorn, Italy, on 7 January 1912 (and consequently belonging to the same generation as Attilio Bertolucci, Piero Bigongiari, Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi, and Vittorio Sereni--the socalled Third Generation), Caproni moved with his family to Genoa...