Essay On Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti, famous Italian writer was born on February 10, 1888, in Alexandria, Egypt, in Italian family who emigrated from the village near Lucca. He lost his father at early age. His father worked as a laborer on the project of the Suez Canal and his mother run a baker’s oven because she needed to maintain the family alone. “Until 1905 Ungaretti frequented the Instituto Don Bosco and the École Suisse Jacot, and in 1912 he went to Paris to study at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne.” (Biography.yourdictionary.com). There he met his future friends, artists and poets such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Guilaume Apollinaire and Giorgio de Chirico. His first poetry was published in 1915 in the Lacerba journal.
He was an infantry soldier in the Champagne on Italian front during the First World War. Then he went to Paris in 1919 and married Jeanne Dupoix. After two years they moved to Rome, where Giuseppe found a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. About ten years later he was a special correspondent for the newspaper “Gazzetta del popolo” and traveled a lot. He also liked to go on lectures on Europe.
Giuseppe became a teacher of Italian language and literature at the Sao Paulo University in Brazil. He accepted this offer in 1936, during the Pen Club Congress. When he returned to Italy in 1942, he became a member of the Italian Academy and then he also worked as a teacher of modern Italian literature at the Rome University. His wife died in 1958 and then he began to travel until his death on June 1, 1970.
While he studied at school in Egypt, he wanted to know a lot about French poetry. He knew a lot from Stéphane Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Paul Valery, and then he adopted his “obscuration technique”. Ungaretti said that real poetry should have "obscure sense of revelation." (Biography.yourdictionary.com).Ungaretti was always interested in man’s existence and the mysteries of life and the poem about these questions was called Vita d'un uomo.
He thought that real writer should not use a lot of words in their works. Economy was the main feature of his style. He also thought that writers must be more concise and must avoid prolixity because it was the main defect of a writer.
His poems’ themes are the aspiration of the innocence and they also recreate his wistful and nostalgic mood. “Yet underlying this sadness is a lyricism which at times rivals Mallarme’s in its magical and musical intensity.” Il Dolore (“Sorrow”), a collection of poems deriving its title from the tragedy of his little son’s death in Brazil at the age of nine, contains some of his most beautiful verse; in Tu ti spezzasti (“You were broken”) he suggests with one phrase or word an infinity of passion, melancholy or aspiration, extracting a poetic magic even from the hideous realities of life and death” (Biography.yourdictionary.com).
Giuseppe Ungaretti once said that he had four favourite and “native” countries: Egypt, the place where he was born; Italy, his family country; Brazil, the home of his education and job as a teacher; France, the country where he studied and met his friends such as Giorgio de Chirico and the whole artistic movement. He recorded all his impressions about these countries in his poems and prose. It was a great writer, and T.S. Eliot once said that Ungaretti was one of the most authentic poets of Western Europe.

Work cited

Biography.yourdictionary.com,. 'Giuseppe Ungaretti Facts'. N.p., 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
Encyclopedia Britannica,. 'Giuseppe Ungaretti | Biography - Italian Poet'. N.p., 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
Poetryfoundation.org,. 'Giuseppe Ungaretti : The Poetry Foundation'. N.p., 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.