This chapter provides a brief summary of the historical context particular to Italy before moving into an overview of key literary themes and concerns of wartime poets, including a consideration of the difference between the poet-soldier and the soldier-poet; the early enthusiasm for intervention and what was seen by some as war’s potential for national renewal; and a later ambivalence about the war on the part of many poets. Individual sections dedicated to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vittorio Locchi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ardengo Soffici, Clemente Rebora, Piero Jahier, Corrado Alvaro, Ugo Betti, and Umberto Saba explore and contrast the very different experiences, attitudes and styles of these nine literary figures, some far better-known than others. The final section focuses on the work of Ada Negri, one of the most important Italian women poets of the era, and her descriptions of maternal anguish on the home front.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).