Hermeticism (poetry)

[2] During the same year (1936), Italian poet Carlo Bo published an essay on the literary magazine Il Frontespizio, by the title "Letteratura come vita (Literature as a way of life)", containing the theoretical-methodological fundamentals of hermetic poetry.

On the literary plane, the term Hermeticism thus highlights a type of poetry which has a close (i.e., hermetic, hidden, sealed)[3] character, complex in its construction and usually achieved by a sequence of analogies difficult to interpret.

Rejecting any direct social and political involvement, in order to detach themselves from the fascist culture, the hermetic group used a difficult and closed style in the analogic form, with a constant emotional introspection.

Man lives in an incomprehensible world, ravaged by wars and enslaved by dictatorships, therefore the poet has a disheartened vision of life, without illusions, and repudiates the word as an act of communication in order to give it an evocative sense only.

During the second half of the 1930s, and important hermetic group arose in Florence, around the Italian magazines Il Frontespizio and Solaria who were inspired by the works of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo e Arturo Onofri, and directly referred to European symbolism, also approaching more recent movements such as surrealism and existentialism.