Atlantic reflections on Giuseppe Ungaretti: The man, the journeys, the poet

Abstract

In this article I offer an Atlantic-world reading of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s life and poetry. Focusing on several important events in his biography and on how they contributed to the shaping of his poetics, I argue that Ungaretti can be fruitfully appreciated as an Atlantic poet, beyond the national confines of the Italian literary tradition. While Ungaretti’s oeuvre fits readily into a cosmopolitan ambience, the application of a specifically Atlantic-world paradigm to his works and days allows us to fully understand his famous claim of being a “docile fibra dell’universo.” This allusive subjective claim suggests that from the onset of his career he saw himself as a citizen of the world, a self-conscious status that nicely captures the way he approached his writing and the way he understood human experience in general. Furthermore, it is on this basis that I would also like to suggest a cultural dialogue between his work and the spirit of the blues, inasmuch as his poems are often the extemporaneous product of a particular biographical experience that tends to trespass geographical continents to become universal.