SOURCE: “Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile,” in Italica, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring, 1970, pp. 3-27.

In the following essay, Brown discusses Gentile's literary essays analyzing the poetry of Dante and Leopardi.

I.

If the primary purpose of literary criticism is to convey a sense of the unique individuality of a poet and his poems, as most Italian critics since Francesco De Sanctis have believed, then Giovanni Gentile is a much finer critic than has yet been recognized. Although Gentile's main interests, from the turn of the century until his death in 1944, were in philosophy and educational reform, he also wrote a series of critical essays in which he struggles, with increasing insight, to understand the nature of poetic individuality and to articulate his sense of the individuality of the poetry of Dante and Leopardi. Although Petrarch, Alfieri, and Manzoni also came under his scrutiny, only Dante and...