The Poet of Sighs. Diego Valeri and his "twilight"
10 months ago
There was… there were many roses / looking out a window, / laughing like brides / getting ready for the party”. We know from reliable sources that these verses by Diego Valeri made Leonardo Sciascia smile. Who knows how many smiles and how much vertigo he would have today, in front of certain modern poetic peaks. Let's take the opportunity of a great author's smile to take a walk in time, in the oblivion of analogical poetry, that of the twilight, defined by Antonio Borgese, in La Stampa, in 1910: "The murky and slimy melancholy of having nothing to say or do". Let's pick from the pile two representative figures of that time following sunset, who had in common the attention for "good things in bad taste". Now that we are in the middle of the day, with vanity at its zenith, perhaps a certain neo-melodic poem which narrates, with a sort of composed solemnity, little seductive little things, "dreamy figures in perplexity", seems naive or simpleton to us, since today we know a lot about enchantment. “I love only the roses / that I didn't pick / I love only the roses / that could have been and have not / been”.
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