My Five Favorite Poets

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason,” wrote Novalis, and I believe this sentence is perfect for de-understanding the power of poetry, which like a sweet medicine spreads over our wounds and soothes pain, even if for the time of its reading.

I have always preferred to write poetry rather than novels or short stories. I am deeply fascinated by words, by their sound, their origin, their assonance; the most beautiful gift my father gave me, as a child, was the eighteen volumes of the Universal Encyclopedia: every day I opened a random volume and read the etymology of the words that I found, and I wrote down the most particular ones.

Indian shamans, as well as Filipino healers, the Babaylan, have always believed in the healing power of words, rather than in medicines. The word can cure.

So, I bought, in my adolescence, many poetry books. There was a remote time when, every Saturday evening, I’d gone in a splendid house in the center of Rome, in a poetic circle, reading our poems, but now, I remember it as if it were a parallel era, that never existed. 

The problem of poetry is the same as for Icarus. Magnificent words make us fly too high, get drunk, make us believe that we are better than we are, make us lose contact with the ground and fly too close to the sun which, by loosening our wings, makes us fall to the ground. As we say here, the Poet lives in his Ivory Tower and observes all humanity from above of his precious solitude.

What a serious mistake. 

You have to be careful with words, they heal and make you drunk. 

However, for me, poetry remains one of the most beautiful vessels to cross the ocean. These are my five favorite poets.

 

1 – The first is undoubtedly the enfant maudit of Poetry, Arthur Rimbaud, the young French boy who, with Baudelaire and Verlaine, formed the triad of Decadentism in Poetry.

Like him there were no other poets, he was like Mozart for music, early and a talented fire. Beautiful like an angel and cursed like a devil. One of the most mysterious destinies of literature. Rimbaud wrote only for three years, from 16 to 19 years, in which he proclaimed the “derailment of all the senses”, the release of the senses, to become poet and clairvoyant, thanks also to the abuse of opium and absinthe, and stormy passion love with the poet friend Paul Verlaine.

An indomitable soul, unable to find peace, who traveled Europe on foot. At 19 years old he composed “A Season in Hell”, one of the masterpieces of Poetry of all time, to then condemn himself to silence and start traveling, to become a slave trader in Africa. He was also among the first to visit Bali.

Rimbaud, the blue-eyed poet, is the emblem of the cursed poet, in which life and art become one, and like a meteor reaches very high peaks of poetry and then give up everything, to choose the adventure.

I bought his book in 1991, at the age of seventeen, after falling in love with Decadentism during the lessons of literature in high school: the “artificial paradises” of Baudelaire, Verlaine, the “Chants of Maldoror” of Lautréamont. But, for me, Rimbaud was truly the rebellious genius, the “clairvoyant”, who gave the colors to the vowels, who experimented with new languages, the vagabond in the dark (in a thousand ways he has been described by literary criticism). As he wrote in a letter to Paul Demeny: “The poet is truly a thief of fire,” and his task is to discover the destinies of humanity, cultivate hallucinations.

I was the same age when I started composing poems and, until now, I consider him the poet par excellence. Even if he wrote for only three years he really had a vision, a fire that burned everything.

In 1891 a knee tumor led to the amputation of his leg, as he predicted in an old poem of his, precisely in the legs of him who was one of the greatest walkers in the history of literature.

He died in November 1891, at the age of thirty-seven.

“Je m'en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées;
paletot aussi devenait idéal
J'allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j'étais ton féal;
Oh! là là ! que d'amours splendides j'ai rêvées!” 

“I went off, my fists in my torn pockets,
Even my coat was becoming ideal:
I went beneath the sky, Muse! I was yours;
Oh! What splendid loves I dreamed of!”

(from “Ma Bohème”)

 

2 – If Rimbaud is the symbol of adventurous, rebellious and cursed life, Emily Dickinson is completely the opposite.

Known as the white lady of poetry, the American poet, born in Massachusetts in 1830, has a life that is anything but eventful. Indeed, her fame, as well as for the splendid poems, is linked precisely to her choice of life, that of total imprisonment and isolation, in her home. It's said for a love disappointment, it has never been understood with certainty, but at the age of thirty-two Emily chose to dress only in white and not to leave her home: the borders of the world became home walls and her garden. Here she wrote for another twenty years, died at 56, among the most beautiful poems in American and world literature.

I grew up with the myth of the imagination, from when I drew and created on white paper as a child, up to the passions related to writing before and photography now.

Imagination, vision, is the only thing that makes us truly free, as Shakespeare's Hamlet perfectly summed up: “I could live in the shell of a nut and still consider myself king of an infinite space.”

Therefore, I often quote Dickinson because she was this: the power of imagination.

Allen Tate, in his essay on Emily Dickinson of 1932, writes just this:

“All pity for Miss Dickinson's ‘undernourished life’ is badly spent. Her life was among the richest and most profound that have been lived on this continent.

When she went up to her room and closed the door, she dominated life through renunciation.”

Her language is very rich, she invented a new form of punctuation, a use of rhymes and impressive assonances. Often short but highly symbolic and visionary poems.

Wherever you are locked up, in physical or mental spaces, when it seems that you cannot breathe, because of a claustrophobia of the soul, or because forced into places that oppress you like prisons, remember this sweet woman of the late nineteenth century, dressed in white, intent to water the flowers in her garden for twenty years, but whose visionary and imaginative power took her to places so remote that a life would not be enough for us.

No chain can stop our fantasy.

“Water, is taught by thirst.
Land – by the Oceans passed.
Transport – by throe –
Peace – by its battles told –
Love, by Memorial Mold –
Birds, by the Snow”

(1859)

3 – Constantine Kavafis is considered the most important modern Greek poet. Born in Alexandria in Egypt to a Greek family in 1863, he wrote only 154 poems in his life, inspired mainly by the classical Greek tradition and his mythology.

Unlike Dickinson, he experienced a forced confinement, in the lock of his room, with the shutters lowered by the light of a single lamp, because he was marginalized and avoided because of his homosexuality.

He was ignored all his life, died at 70, condemned to fight his inner demons on his own, and that sense of guilt for an eroticism considered by society to be wrong, evil. Poetry was his only form of salvation, endurance and beauty.

I bought his book in 1996, and – like everyone who read his work – I fell head over heels in love with one of his most famous poems, “Ithaca”, written in 1911.

I consider this poem, although the previous works of Rimbaud and Dickinson are at the top of my list, the most beautiful poem that has ever been written in modern times, without disturbing those classics that inspired Kavafis himself.

Ithaca is in fact the Homeric journey of Ulysses in the Odyssey. But it is much more. It's the most wonderful way to describe, in poetry, the meaning of our existence.

It's the greatest lesson we are given to learn in life: that is, it's not the destination that is important, Ithaca is not the meaning of the voyage at sea, but the voyage itself. Although, upon arriving in Ithaca, we will find that place disappointing, it will not be worth crying out of sadness because the true meaning is not in the shore, but in every moment of our going to sea.

Without Ithaca, we would never have embarked on that journey called existence. 

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now. 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

(from “Ithaka”, 1911)

4 – Alda Merini is a unique case in Italian and worldwide literature. Recently disappeared in 2009, a lot has been written about her, especially for her life full of pain. Poetess since the age of 15, she never found the support of her beloved father, who tore her poems in front of her because they would never “give her bread”.

Bipolar disorders begin which force her to enter and leave the mental hospital, where she spends most of her life, always continuing to write.

Merini will write a lot, especially on the theme of madness, with a very high lyrical language. Mind clouded by disease and yet very lucid. Hers are considered among the most intense poems of contemporary literature.

“I have the feeling of lasting too long, of not being able to extinguish myself: like all old people, my roots struggle to give up the earth. But after all I often tell everyone that that cross without justice that was my asylum has done nothing but reveal to me the great power of life.”

(from "The madwoman next door", 1995)

 

5 – Lastly, Giuseppe Ungaretti, born as Kavafis in Alexandria in Egypt, the only one in the trio, with Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, who represented Hermeticism in Italy, for not having won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ungaretti has revealed to all of us how to write deep thoughts and very high themes on existence even with only two, three verses.

The careful choice of a few words is no less than the long poems, rather it is more dazzling and powerful. 

Reading Ungaretti taught me how to remove, many times, is better than adding, in writing.

After all, the sculptor does this: to reveal the beauty of the statue he has to remove all excess marble. 

Mattina
"M'illumino
d'immenso."

Morning
"I enlighten
with immensity."

(1917)

 

Arthur Rimbaud: "Opere" (Einaudi, 1990)
Emily Dickinson: "Poesie" (Fabbri Editore, 1997)
Costantino Kavafis: "Poesie" (Mondadori, 1996)
Alda Merini: "Superba è la notte" (Einaudi, 2000)
Giuseppe Ungaretti: "Vita d'un uomo - 106 poesie 1914-1960" (Mondadori, 1992)

Italian version