SOURCE: “Modern Italian Poets: Cossa and Carducci.” Edinburgh Review 155, no. 317 (April 1882): 49-60.

The following excerpt highlights examples of Carducci's poetry to emphasize his frank perspective and literary talents.

Contemporary Italian literature is comparatively so little known in England that many readers may possibly see in these pages the name of Giosué Carducci for the first time. Yet it can be said without exaggeration that in the general estimation of his countrymen he holds the first place among living Italian poets. Different from Cossa in many qualities of mind and temperament, he differs from him also in the precocious manifestation of his genius. Cossa, as we have seen, was forty years old before he produced his best work; and even his earlier poems were not written in boyhood. Carducci, on the contrary, like many another poet, scribbled verses when a mere child; and of his published poems several date...