SOURCE: "Pier Paolo Pasolini's Dialect Poetry," in Forum ltalicum, Vol. IX, No. 4, December 1975, pp. 343-67.

In the following essay, O'Neill comments on Pasolini's use of Friulian dialect in his poetry, and on his Spanish and Italian poetic influences.

Perhaps the best synthesis of the world of Pasolini's dialect poetry is that given, unconsciously, by the author himself in the important 1952 essay on La poesia dialettale del Novecento, talking of the Triestine poet, Giotti:

Una povera storia, infinitamente più nuda e deserta che nei crepuscolari, poiché nella sua angoscia non c'è compiacimento o ripensamento da favola decadente, ma come un interno terrore, una nozione della morte e del disfacimento del mondo, delle cose care e degli affetti, che ha quasiun remoto accento leopardiano.

The "mondo" of which Pasolini speaks is that of Friuli, specifically Casarsa, the birthplace of his mother, to where his family had been evacuated in 1943, and...