SOURCE: Frisardi, Andrew. “Giuseppe Ungaretti and the Image of Desolation.” The Hudson Review LV, no. 1 (spring 2002): 75-89.

In the following essay, Frisardi offers a general assessment of Ungaretti's poetry through the lens of many of the details of the poet's life.

When I read a “hermetic” poet like Ungaretti, I often get the sense that his language has been pared by doubt, as if he felt that breaking the semantic threads of grammar would clear the way for a renewed sense of meaning in his doubting heart and mind. Or maybe his stitched-together fragments represent vestiges of faith or confidence in life's meaningfulness. Either way, it is an effort, and we feel the strain of it, of a religious sensibility to construct a cloister of language in a secular age.

Allegria di Naufragi (Joy of Shipwrecks, 1919), Ungaretti's first full-length collection, established his reputation overnight as one of the...