SOURCE: "Pasolini: Organic Intellectual'?" in Italian Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, Nos. 119-20, Winter-Spring, 1990, pp. 81-100.

In the following excerpt, Greene surveys Pasolini's intellectual response to the thought of Antonio Gramsci, as reflected in his political verse.

Pasolini's great debt to [Antonio] Gramsci (a debt he repeatedly acknowledged, defining himself at one point as "gramscian") was by no means an unususal phenomenon among members of his generation: as one historian has noted, the discovery of Gramsci's writings after the war "created a sub-renaissance within the wider reawakening of Italian cultural life." But he may have been unique in that his response to Gramsci was always colored by a deep and complex ambivalence. It is this ambivalence, in fact, and the resulting tensions (which greatly intensified in the course of his career) that lie at the heart of one of his most famous poems, "Le ceneri di Gramsci" ("The Ashes of...