Hermeticism

According to Joseph Cary in Three Modern Italian Poets, there was a "national poetic renaissance" beginning in the 1910s in Italy, associated with the work of Umberto Saba and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and later with Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo. Ungaretti was the leader of what came to be known as the hermetic school of poetry. It was so named because the poets of this school wrote in an obscure style, using highly symbolic and subjective language that others found hard to penetrate. (The term "hermetic" derives from alchemy and refers to something that is completely sealed.)

The roots of hermeticism lie in the French symbolist poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery, but some of the obscurity is in part because in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, the Fascist Party controlled literary and artistic expression, which meant poets were not always able to openly speak their minds in...