Renato Poggioli

[5] Members included Gaetano Salvemini (whose final lectures before his exile from Italy in 1925 Poggioli had heard as a student at the University of Florence); the former Italian foreign minister, Count Carlo Sforza; and Max Ascoli.

The following year he became Assistant Professor of Italian Literature teaching graduate students at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with an interruption from 1943–45 when he served in the United States Army as a translator.

The publication was intended to expose Italian readers, whose horizons had for years been narrowed by Mussolini's censorship, to a broad range of new developments in contemporary literature of all countries.

[7] It published literary and critical works by and about such important writers as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Boris Pasternak.

Poggioli's own magnum opus, his Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia, which traced the connection between the twentieth-century avant garde and the legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism, first appeared in Inventario in four installments between 1949 and 51.

In the fall of 1947, Harvard University, as part of its ongoing expansion of its department of Slavic studies, hired Poggioli and two year later, Roman Jakobson – in 1952 the two would collaborate on an edition of the Medieval Russian epic, Tale of Igor's Campaign.

After completing an academic year at Stanford University as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Poggioli took his family by car to Portland, Oregon, where he intended to visit Reed College.