Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile

Abstract

If the primary purpose of literary criticism is to convey a sense of the unique individuality of a poet and his poems, as most Italian critics since Francesco De Sanctis have believed, then Giovanni Gentile is a much finer critic than has yet been recognized. Although Gentile's main interests, from the turn of the century until his death in 1944, were in philosophy and educational reform, he also wrote a series of critical essays in which he struggles, with increasing insight, to understand the nature of poetic individuality and to articulate his sense of the individuality of the poetry of Dante and Leopardi. Although Petrarch, Alfieri, and Manzoni also came under his scrutiny, only Dante and Leopardi sustained his interest and elicited efforts of understanding. Only his essays on them are complex enough to serve as counterparts to the advances in his philosophy. If his response to poetry seriously affected the nature of his philosophy, as I think it did, it is mainly the poetry of )ante and Leopardi that had this effect. The significance of Gentile's criticism must be maintained in the face of almost universal opposition by Italian philosophers and critics. Croce felt that Gentile was utterly anaesthetic in his reading of any and all poems and that his actualistic philosophy, as logocentric, was fundamentally at odds with poetry. Guido Calogero has said that the aesthetics of a man as insensitive to art as Gentile could not be taken