In the historical context of contemporary poetic modes, Silvio Ramat's work represents the most significant continuation of the Florentine hermetic school. Ascribed by Giovanni Raboni to the so-called generation of 1956 and chronologically belonging more to the avant-grade of the 1960s, Ramat has a motive power that lies in an innate, pressing urge to renovate poetic language and to reconcile previous thematic and formalistic treatments with an openness to emotional impressions of autobiographical integrity and sensitivity. He enriches the poetic systems promulgated by Mario Luzi and Vittorio Sereni with realistic and social stimuli. His poetry evokes all the canonical criteria of the hermetic tradition: preference for the synthetic blend of expression, composition, and inflection; widespread reference to a spiritual condition that is ambiguous and undefinable; an interest in the sonority of the word and the associative function of language; a lyric tonality that oscillates between mental perception and narrative...