Lucio Piccolo's first verses were almost immediately labeled archaic, as critics found them difficult to understand and accept, since they were outside the well-established 1950s currents of hermeticism, neo-realism, and post-futurism. From the first years of publication, Piccolo's poetry was regarded as unclassifiable. Although these were the years that saw the end of neorealism as a movement, there persisted a need to understand the relation between poetry and reality. Piccolo's difficult verses seemed to offer no immediate connection to the contemporary world. His first poems evoke a world of past beauty and reawakened a taste for the delicate, intricate images of antiquity, while his later verses convey an existential, metaphysical anguish not found among Italian poetic currents of the time. All are presented in such a refined, baroque style as to evoke the charge that the works are anachronistic.

Piccolo's reclusive, somewhat uneventful life seemed to underscore the...