SOURCE: "The Italian Critics," in A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950; The Romantic Age, Yale University Press, 1955, pp. 259-78.

In the following essay, Wellek evaluates the theoretical component of the Italian Romantic movement, especially in the critical thought of Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi.

The Italian romantic movement is usually considered as beginning with the polemics stirred up by an article (1816) of Madame de Staël in which she urged the Italians to translate Shakespeare and recent English and German poetry rather than to remain content with classical mythology, which in the rest of Europe had been abandoned and forgotten.¹ Italian national vanity was deeply hurt; nevertheless, a group of younger people in Milan came to the defense of Madame de Staël. Lodovico di Breme condemned at length the low intellectual state of Italian literature at that time, drawing attention to the stir caused by the romantic-classical...