SOURCE: "Myth and De-Mythification of Pavese's Art," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 49, Summer, 1969, pp. 3-39.

In the following excerpt, Rimanelli compares Pavese to his Italian contemporaries and discusses the use of myth in Lavorare stanca.

In A proposito di certe poesie non ancora scritte Pavese says that "only critical awareness brings a poetic cycle to an end" [Poesie, 1962]. In this sense that which had been the poetry of modernism, that is to say the poetry of the '20's, already in 1936 represented a period that had come to a close. A closed period which—at best—allowed only variations on its main themes.

The greatest living poets of the time—[Ezra] Pound, [T. S.] Eliot, [Paul] Valery—had already formulated their experiences and now they merely amplified them. For their part the young poets were taking other directions. In England the Oxford group was decisively in favor of...