With a dynamic innovative spirit and an awareness, from a very young age, of European and world trends in art and thought, Vittorio Bodini typifies in his poetry the existential anguish of the people of the southern regions of Italy, their metaphysical dimension and their social characteristics. His intellectual vigor was a stimulus to the continued renewal of cultural life in his native region of Apulia and brought to the national literature a new voice that was an original blend of the baroque and the surreal, traditions that played relevant roles in the growth of his poetics. However, the quotidian reality of his region, the plight of the oppressed, and the problems of social injustice remained a constant throughout his poetic evolution, whether thematically present, as in his first two collections of poetry, or as a background allusion in his later poems.

Bodini was born in Bari, the...