Hermeticism: Authors, poetics, characteristics, philosophy, summary and explanation of the literary movement. Who are the hermetic and pre-hermetic poets.Hermeticism is a literary movement of the early twentieth century, which we must recognize the merit of having brought about important changes and substantial innovations both in terms of language and style and in terms of content, structuring itself as a historical-literary phase of enormous growth and diffusion for Italian poetry of the last century.
The term hermeticism has a specific etymology : it derives from Hermes (or Mercury) , god of the occult and mysterious sciences, and was used for the first time, in a derogatory sense, by the critic Francesco Flora , who in a 1936 writing entitled La poesia ermetica defined the new poetry of the 20th century as “hermetic”, that is, as closed, obscure, mysterious and difficult to interpret and codify . In the history of Italian literature, the reading public has become increasingly varied from a social and cultural point of view (no longer composed of only scholars but also of ordinary people) and has shifted its interest increasingly towards prose rather than poetry, also because it was not always able to fully understand the formal elaboration implied by it.
Especially in modern society, the poet has always been seen as a solitary individual , detached from reality, a symbol of a certain marginalization and of a certain rejection or contempt towards a vast public. This is what happens to poetry in the early twentieth century, in a difficult historical period tormented by the negative experiences of the world wars and fascism . Precisely during the twenty years of fascism , a closed and “coded” poetry like the hermetic one allowed some intellectuals to express in indirect ways and intended for a few readers their own polemic or indifference towards the fascist regime. In this way they were able to avoid compromising themselves with political power and fascism and to close themselves in their own world to meditate on the existence and destiny of man.
Hermeticism offers a poetry “armoured” in a few obscure messages : it becomes the voice of a solitary and absolute individual, closed in on himself rather than open to the novelties of his time, such as wars or the fascist regime. These events are not analysed in a critical way (that is, they are neither exalted nor criticised by the hermetics), but only described on the basis of the poet’s reaction to them (reaction of dismay, fear, solitude, estrangement or indifference). That is, there is no other reality outside of that of their soul. The hermetic poet does not experience reality as something to be objectively recounted in his work, but rather as something into which to project his interiority .
For this reason, hermetic poetry has often been accused of egocentrism , of exalting individual problems and neglecting the real problems of humanity, of being alien to the life of its own time rather than participating with action and commitment in the fascist regime in force.
Hermetic poetry glosses over the events of daily news , but does not ignore the larger and more universal problems, such as those concerning the destiny and existence of man: perhaps this closing in on oneself constituted for the hermetics of those years the only defense against the regime and its noisy and despotic politics.
Hermetic poetry is rather the interior excavation of a man who looks inside himself while wandering alone in modern civilization , in which he feels disoriented and disoriented. He experiences his own life and, in general, human life, as pain and evil. He desperately searches for a relationship of harmony and solidarity with the outside world , but then finds it arid and empty. He searches for a certainty that will finally illuminate his existence but in the end he finds it only in his own poetry, which thus becomes a cry of desperation.
The Characteristics of Hermeticism
Furthermore, hermetic poetry is almost always an autobiographical poetry , focused on some aspect of the poet’s own existence, on his feelings, on his sensations and emotions, on his life experiences, on his pains: it is not an abstract poetry, but it is the poetry of man, of his concrete existence and of his desperate resistance to the destruction of history. Such autobiographical nature suggests how close the relationship between life and literature is for hermetic poetry. Many previous poets had spoken about themselves in their work, for example D’Annunzio had described in his poems and novels his own life experiences, his love affairs, his travels or his heroic participation in the war: the function of poetry for him was to exhibit the poet’s life as a spectacular, heroic life, made of consensus and successes.
On the contrary, the hermetic poets understood poetry as a subtle excavation of their own interiority , without exhibiting anything to the public, but only expressing their feelings in a reserved way. Closed and reserved, essential and concise were the forms with which the hermetic poets expressed their feelings in poetry. With their verses they do not narrate, do not explain, but fix on the page fragments of truth that they arrived at in moments of deep inspiration, without the help of reasoning and logic. Since the negative experiences of war and the fascist regime had condemned them to a strong solitude, they were not at all interested in being clear and precise in their poetry, since no one could ever truly understand what they really wanted to express.
The compositions of the Hermeticists broke drastically with all the canons and with all the rules of previous poetry: they no longer respected traditionally imposed schemes such as rhyme, stanzas, meter, punctuation or the number of lines; very often their poetic text was sparse, brief, essential, made up of very few lines and very few words, just enough to express the state of mind of the moment.
There was no longer any need for a real speech to create poetry, but a few words were enough, in which, however, all the sensations felt were extraordinarily concentrated.
Even when isolated from speech, hermetic poetry retained its evocative power and explained many more things than a long, syntactically elaborate and grammatically complex speech would have expressed. The word is naked, stripped of any common meaning, and acquires value only if related to the emotions that the poet is experiencing at that moment. Poetry has no need to be decorated or embellished with refined and elegant forms ; the important thing is that it is present in the text to arouse in the reader the same sensations that the poet wanted to communicate: the feeling must emerge naked and must impose itself thanks to its own strength and not through the beauty of the expression.
Even the poetic composition as a whole is essential , stripped down to the bone and short-lived, concentrating its entire message in a few lines. What is striking about hermetic poetry is the almost total absence of punctuation, the words are scattered here and there without being linked by periods and commas; they do not need to be linked to each other, but are sufficient in themselves to express their own meanings. For this reason, hermetic poetry is usually defined as “pure” , because it condenses a maximum of meanings in a minimum of expressive tools. It does not need common logical language to express its message to the public, but in a single word, in a single verse it is capable of condensing the deepest truths about man and things. Even the white spaces, the voids left between one word and another, are charged with strong meanings expressing the sense of emptiness felt by the poet or his need for silent concentration.
On the contrary, previous poetry, especially the nineteenth-century and romantic one , expressed its messages in broad , rhetorical and oratorical structures, with which to persuade the public, and faithfully respected those imposed measures (the rhyme in forced position, the sonnet, the ode) that hermetic poetry will abolish completely for a freer expression of the poet’s feelings. Among the expressive instruments that characterize hermetic poetry, we remember above all the symbol and the analogy .
As for the symbol , it is important to remember that many hermetic poets were particularly influenced by a European poetic movement called symbolism , which flourished especially in France in the early twentieth century. It was from the symbolists that the hermetics took the use of the symbol , that is, the process by which any object is used to represent something else. It is not always easy in hermetic poetry to decipher the symbol , that is, to translate the symbol into what the author really wanted to represent through it: very often the associations are completely personal and arbitrary and therefore difficult for the reader to interpret and codify.
Analogy , on the other hand, is that expressive technique that juxtaposes different images and situations without any apparent connection, to establish original relationships. But even in this case, in hermetic poetry, the juxtaposition is difficult to understand within the text : it is not with reason or logic, but with instinct and sensitivity that one finds the interpretative key of analogical associations.
Hermeticism: poets
Hermetic poetry spread in Italy in approximately three phases :
- Years 1911/22 : at first the first tendencies of hermetic poetry spread (short text and break with tradition) and the tendency of these poets towards a certain essentiality was called Fragmentism . It included intellectuals who collaborated with the newspaper “La Voce” and poets such as Umberto Saba , Clemente Rebora, Dino Campana or Camillo Sbarbaro;
- 1923/33 : at a later stage, the great lyrical personalities of early twentieth-century poetry emerged, including Ungaretti and Montale , points of reference for the entire subsequent generation of poets with their use of symbols, analogies and their “pure” poetry;
- Years 1933/44 : in a third moment, the poetics of Hermeticism was also codified in pre-established and applied canons and schemes and a real school of hermetic poets was born, among which Penna, Sinisgalli, Gatto and Luzi .
