Giosuè Carducci

Nobel Prize in Literature 1906

Italian poet and man of letters, Giosuè Carducci was born on July 27, 1835, in a Tuscan town called ValdiCastello. Son of an atheist doctor and ardent defender of the Italian Union, a member of the Carbonari, he was raised to love his country and its poets.
Due to his father's political convictions, which condemned his life to a perpetual succession of persecutions and exiles, young Carducci wandered throughout Italy until his father finally managed to settle in Florence in 1849. He remained there for two years, and there he began to write, inspired by the English and German Romantics, especially Lord Byron and Friedrich Schiller. Following in his father's footsteps, who in 1851 reconverted to Catholicism and accepted the position of provincial doctor in the small village of Celle, Giosuè Carducci took advantage of the brief idyll to teach patriotic songs to the other boys, also composing religious verses. Nevertheless, his father's political vein resurfaced, and, entangled with the law, he was relegated to a poorly paid surgeon's post, demoted almost to the level of a barber.
Giosuè then sought a way to support his student ambitions, which he managed to do by compiling an anthology of Italian poetry. L'Arpa Del Popolo, Scelta Di Poemi Religiosi, Morali E Patriotici (1855). He also began a career in journalism, writing for the The Appendix articles that earned him a certain reputation.
Having thus secured his studies, he graduated in Philosophy from the University of Pisa and went on to obtain his doctorate in 1856 from the same institution. Scuola Normale SuperioreAfterwards, he began working as a teacher in Pistoia, becoming quite respected for his captivating Classical Greek classes. The glimpse of happiness, however, would be overshadowed by melancholy, cultivated by his brother's suicide and his father's death. Revolted by the injustice of misfortune, Carducci became relentless in his press criticism, which only added to his reputation for seriousness and rigor.
In 1859 he believed he had discovered in republican ideals the anti-clerical force that his monarchist convictions could not express. Appointed professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, he was suspended in 1863 and risked being transferred in 1867, but remained head of the Italian Literature department until 1904.
As the son of his father, Carducci left behind a body of work marked by his political concerns, alternately pro- and anti-monarchist, and by an unwavering love for his country, which he longed to see united. He was considered a great pioneer in the innovation of the formal structures of Italian poetry. Juvenilia (1860), L'Inno A Satana (1865), Levia Gravia (1868), Giambi Ed Epodi (1879) and Confess and Battaglie (1882-84) were examples of that soul who wished that the humanity of Italy would equal the beauty and tranquility of its landscapes.
Considered the national poet of unified Italy, he was made a senator for life in 1890. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1906. Giosuè Carducci died in Lucca on February 16, 1907. His complete works were published in a thirty-volume edition between 1939 and 1941, under the title... Operate Complete.

Giosuè Carducci. In Infopédia [Online]. Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2011.