SOURCE: Donadoni, Eugenio. “Giosuè Carducci.” In A History of Italian Literature, pp. 455-87. New York: New York University, 1969.

In the following essay, Donadoni follows Carducci's career path and classifies Carducci's poems chronologically into groupings of landscape, introspection, political poetry, and lyrics that combined these characteristics.

Writing within a prevailingly Romanticist or Manzonian generation, the figure of Giosuè Carducci was that of a restorer of the classical tradition. His style and language, as though reverting to the somewhat solemn modes of Foscolo, departed from the “spoken” character of Manzonian prose and recovered a native literary flavor. Drawn more from the wellspring of writers than from the ordinary popular language, they raised even the speech of the people to the special tone of the more distinctly literary tradition. In so doing, there was no contriving or willful capriciousness, because such was the spontaneous tendency of the poet.

Furthermore, a large...