[2] Marino's conception of poetry, which exaggerated the artificiality of Mannerism, was based on an extensive use of antithesis and a whole range of wordplay, on lavish descriptions and a sensuous musicality of the verse, and enjoyed immense success in his time, comparable to that of Petrarch before him.

[2] With the 20th century renaissance of interest in similar poetic procedures, his work has been reevaluated: it was closely read by Benedetto Croce and Carlo Calcaterra and has had numerous important interpreters including Giovanni Pozzi, Marziano Guglielminetti, Marzio Pieri and Alessandro Martini.

Marino remained in his birthplace Naples until 1600, leading a life of pleasure after breaking off relations with his father who wanted his son to follow a career in law.

Regarding this subject, some critics (including Giovanni Pozzi) have stressed the great influence on him exerted by northern Italian cultural circles; others (such as Marzio Pieri) have emphasised the fact that the Naples of the time, though partly in decline and oppressed by Spanish rule, was far from having lost its eminent position among the capitals of Europe.

[citation needed] Marino's father was a highly cultured lawyer, from a family probably of Calabrian origin, who frequented the coterie of Giambattista Della Porta.

But more importantly, these surroundings put Marino in direct contact with the natural philosophy of Della Porta and the philosophical systems of Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella.

While Campanella himself was to oppose "Marinism" (though not attacking it directly), this common speculative background should be borne in mind with its important pantheistic (and thus neo-pagan and heterodox) implications, to which Marino would remain true all his life and exploit in his poetry, obtaining great success amongst some of the most conformist thinkers on the one hand while encountering continual difficulties because of the intellectual content of his work on the other.

L'Adone [it] (Adonis), which was published in Paris in 1623 and dedicated to the French king Louis XIII, is a mythological poem written in ottava rima divided into twenty cantos.

Into this flimsy framework Marino inserts the most famous stories from mythology, including the Judgement of Paris, Cupid and Psyche, Echo and Narcissus, Hero and Leander, Polyphemus and numerous others.

Thus the poem, which was originally intended to be only three cantos in length, was so enriched that it became one of the longest epics in Italian literature, made up of 5123 eight-line stanzas (40,984 verses), an immense story with digressions from the main theme and descriptive pauses.

The poet composes his work using various levels and passes from one episode to the next without any apparent logical connection, basing the links solely on a language rich in hyperboles, antitheses and metaphors.

Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry.

Many works were announced but never written, including the long poem Le trasformazioni, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, which was abandoned after Marino turned his attention to Adone.

Most notable are the Dicerie sacre (1614), a sort of oratorical handbook for priests, which was considered indispensable by generations of preachers; in its enormously long sermons, which in reality have little to do with religion, Marino takes his transcendent technique of continuous metaphor to an extreme; a feat imitated throughout the Baroque era.

For a long time, critics, who had a negative assessment of Marino's work from the end of the 17th to the last decades of the 20th century, maintained that the poet's intention was to astound his readers through the elegance of the poem's details and his descriptions.