SOURCE: '"Ah Mistica / Filologia!" Rereading Pasolini," in Italian Quarterly, Vols. XXI-XXII, Nos. 82-83, Fall-Winter, 1980-81, pp. 95-8.

In the following essay, Mandelbaum comments on what he deems the "over-sympathetic relation between Pasolini and his audience"

Few poets have declared their own bankruptcy as resolutely as did Pasolini: "Ιο? Ιο sono inaridito e superato," uttered in parentheses, parentheses less complex than Marvell's "my fruits are only flowers" but certainly echt Pasolini. Like Eliot's rueful assessment of "twenty years largely wasted" at the end of "east Coker"; or Swinburne's "least song" at the end of "By the North Sea"; or Montale's musings in "Méditerranée"; or the anti-pride of Pound in the Pisan Cantos—this is not a humility topos, but the product of what I should call an adherent I, an epistolary I (the I of Ungaretti's final strophe in "Monologhetto": "Poeti, poeti, ci siamo messi—Tutte le maschere...