VICO AND CONTEMPORANEITY: VISIONS OF LITERATURE IN VICO, QUASIMODO AND MONTALE

Abstract

Giambattista Vico has certainly anticipated many romantic ideas, starting from the very original re-evaluation of the primitive states of peoples and from the exaltation of an idea of poetry that is opposite of the arcadic search for classicism and balance. If his ideas enjoy high prestige for the extreme originality that they show in the panorama of literary criticism in six-seventeenth century, on the other hand they pay for the fate of being almost always associated to the theories of Herder, Volksgeist and Romanticism. The purpose of this article is to search for traces of Vico’s thought far beyond the romantic and nineteenth-century criticism, in order to reach the twentieth century, with the right amount of prudence in demonstrating not how much moderns have read Vico, but how much he has been, at its time, extraordinarily modern.  The bond between the two cultures will be some theories of Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo: the first one for the way of interpreting Dante (not a modern poet); the other one for the ideas on the value of art and poets. Being aware that between Vico’s times and the twentieth century there is a gap that is difficult to solve with general ideas, we will analyze topics such as the crisis of literary men; the vision of history according to which the modern age is expression of a fundamentally rationalistic time in with poetry can no longer say anything to men; the idea of the Middle Ages as a time of barbarism, and barbarity as a time of poetic wealth.

Keywords: Vico, Quasimodo, Montale, Dante, literature, Middle Ages, barbarity.