The Poetic Logic of Panism: An Idealistic Reading of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Alcyone

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, an influential Italian critic, Emilio Mariano, wrote that Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetics ‘moves on a terrain of Neo-Idealism’. At that time, Mariano had already employed some excerpts from Giovanni Gentile’s works to interpret D’Annunzio’s poetics in his monograph Sentimento del vivere. In an academic environment that has tended to separate literature and philosophy as areas of inquiry, Mariano’s thesis received little further investigation by Italian critics. My article interprets D’Annunzio’s Alcyone through the critical frame of Gentile’s philosophy: actualism. The final goal of the article is to demonstrate that the poetics of panism, which is central in Alcyone, gives shape to some of actualism’s major tropes: the belief that reality is inseparable from the act of consciousness; the will to allow artistic activity to continue the creative work of nature; the idea that the immanence of spirit and matter is never accomplished permanently but rather continues endlessly.