WHAT Ungaretti drew from the War was the peculiar knowledge of a "disabused modern consciousness," not d'Annunzio's heroic myth of the theatrical, but rather the awareness of anonymity and other sorrows. Influenced more by Giacomo Leopardi, the great Italian poet of the nineteenth century, and by Mallarmé, than by the aesthetic exigencies of his own age, Ungaretti shared with his close friends Apollinaire and the Fauvist Braque a profound despair over history's irrationality. But Apollinaire never survived the War, and those who did were so shattered and forlorn that their only response was that of an iconoclastic Dadaism.
Ungaretti survived both the War and many of his friends, and took up, on his own, a more gentle intransigence, the work of creative revolution which he and Appollinaire, among others, had begun in the Paris Academies before the War. The rage which warped so many artists in the years between two wars, verging on insanity and spilling into the excesses of Futurism, was a condition he avoided; Ungaretti took stylistic refuge in the Neo-Symbolist movement of "Hermetic" poetry, in an obscurantism that usually meant praise more than polemic.
The rigors of la poésie pure, the publication of his complete works under the title Vita d'un Uomo, and finally his unanimous election as President of the European Community of Writers in 1962 signaled a waking from the turbulence of his younger years to the task of what Glauco Cambon called "a generous asceticism." The narrative poem, "Choruses Descriptive of Dido's States of Mind," written during the Fifties, brings to Ungaretti's work the knowledge that, in Cambon's words, "Experience is the progressive exorcism of illusion":
Sea's shifting landscapes no longer
Lead me, or lacerating
Pallor of dawn on these or those leaves;
Old night I carry on my eyes,
I cannot set against the block.
Forgotten, what
Do I want with images? (Wylie)
Innocence and Memory, a collection of Ungaretti's essays translated from Italian into French by Philippe Jacottet, comprises in a sense the brilliant sum of his conclusions; and leaves us at the mercy of a memory that haunts us through history with its murmuring of guilt and horror. We must cut ourselves off from the terrors of the past, and Ungaretti's prophetic, guttural voice is the sign of that attempt. And innocence, the breaking off of memory, is not a Christian innocence, not piety, but a form which affirmation takes. "Innocence," Ungaretti writes, "we have learned of what it's made. It has appeared before us, and kept us beneath its still vast wings, through the disorders of our lives." JAMES ATLAS