Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti was an influential Italian poet who was one of the founders of the Hermetic movement, a form of modernist poetry that emphasized obscurity, brevity and musicality. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father worked on the Suez Canal. He moved to Paris in 1912, where he studied at the Sorbonne and became friends with many avant-garde writers and artists, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani. He volunteered for the Italian army during World War I and fought in the trenches, where he wrote his first collection of poems, L’allegria (The Joy), which expressed his existential anguish and his search for meaning in the face of death. After the war, he returned to Paris and then moved to Rome, where he worked as a journalist and a cultural attaché. He also became a supporter of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime, although he later distanced himself from them. He taught Italian literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil from 1936 to 1942, where he wrote his second major collection of poems, Il dolore (The Pain), which reflected his nostalgia for his homeland and his grief for his son Antonietta, who died of meningitis in 1939. He came back to Italy in 1942 and joined the resistance against the Nazis and the Fascists. He was appointed professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Rome in 1944 and held the position until his retirement in 1957. He continued to write poetry and essays, as well as translating works from French, English, Portuguese and ancient Greek. He received many honors and awards, including the inaugural Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1970. He died of heart failure in Milan on June 2, 1970. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a major figure of Italian culture.