SOURCE: "Pasolini and the City: Rome 1950: A Diary," in Italian Quarterly, Vols. XXI-XXII, Nos. 82-83, Fall-Winter, 1980-81, pp. 107-19.

In the following excerpt, Oldcorn examines the poet's formative years in Rome and how they are reflected in his work, particularly in the early verse journal, Rome 1950: A Diary.

The verse journal Roma 1950, diario (Rome 1950: A Diary) remained unknown until 1960, when it was published in a limited edition of 600 copies by Vanni Scheiwiller of Milan. This "book of hours," which chronicles the poet's state of mind in his moments of rest from servile work—his first awakenings, his evenings, holidays, the noontide siesta—is a slim volume of fifteen short poems in more or less regular unrhymed hendecasyllables (the Italian equivalent of blank verse). With the same timid indecision that characterizes the psychological attitudes it represents, the volume hovers between tradition and innovation, between literary freedom and convention, between...