SOURCE: "Lavorare stanca and the Evolution of Pavese's Verse in the Nineteen-Thirties," in Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 13-39.

In the following excerpt, Thompson surveys Pavese's early poetry, finding the works a means by which Pavese examined difficult periods in his life.

Only in 1962, with the publication by Einaudi of Poesie edite e inedite (Published and Unpublished Poems), did it become possible to trace the development of Pavese's poetry during the nineteen-thirties. Up to then there had been two editions of the verse he had written in the thirties—the Solaria edition of Lavorare stanca (Working Is Tiresome) of 1936 and the Einaudi edition of 1943. Even these had revealed substantial differences in tone, point of view and technique, although about half the poems in the second edition had made up the bulk of those in the first. Of the one...