As a poet and left-wing intellectual living in the urban environment of Milan, Giovanni Giudici succeeds in giving his poetry power by refusing the privilege of distance and the posture of radical individualism that the Italian hermetic poets had claimed and retained up to the end of World War II. The open tone of Giudici's poetry and its lack of elitism were well suited to both the time in which it began to appear and to the role of witness that he had chosen. Deeply aware of the problematic currents in postwar Italian society, with its rising materialism and the failure of political action to fuse the self and history into a more integrated whole, he was a representative voice of the cultural climate from which his poetry arose. In the article "Che cosa possiamo imparare da [Arthur] Rimbaud" (What We Can Learn from Rimbaud), collected in La...