SOURCE: Phelps, Ruth Shepard. “Giosuè Carducci.” In Italian Silhouettes, pp. 11-32. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.

In the following essay, Phelps studies Carducci's political, religious, and emotional roots. In the second section, Phelps observes that Carducci brought new and sometimes radical ideas to the Italian public by using forms and meters of the classical tradition.

I

It is a commonplace to say that the nations of the North have seen in Italy from the first the home of romance, the pleasure-place of the imagination. And they have always delighted to heighten her effects. From Chaucer to Walter Pater she has ever been the land of mystery and tragedy, of soft lascivious manners and gorgeous crimes, of a deep magical melancholy which has laid a spell upon the Northern mind—a spell, however, which that mind itself and its tastes have created. The deep racial differences have fascinated the...