SOURCE: “Ugo Foscolo and the Poetry of Exile,” in Mosaic, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall, 1975, pp. 123-42.

In the following essay, Cambon explains how Foscolo's increasing distance from his original homeland of Greece created a strong mythos in his poetry that reflects not just nostalgia but an urge to transcend the present.

For our Western tradition, the literature of exile begins with two very different sources: the Old Testament on the one hand, and Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto on the other. Interdiction of his Roman aqua et ignis wrought a metamorphosis on the jolly author of Ars Amatoria; he now wrote letter upon letter in verse from the ice-caked harbor of Tomis on the Black Sea, from the winter of his life, reiterating both his guilt and his innocence in turn, in desperate flattery of Augustus and desperate entreaty, from among the shaggy, breech-clad, dagger-happy barbarians of Sarmathian...