More Than a Muse: The Life and Poetry of Antonia Pozzi
Jenny Frost
CW: Discussion of suicide
Whether it is Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura, the most famous women in the Italian poetic canon are those created by men: they are poetic muses rather than poets themselves. Throughout the centuries, poetic output in Italy (and in Europe) has been dominated by men—names like Montale, Leopardi, Saba and Ungaretti are those which come to mind when considering Italy’s great poets. In addition, when European women’s voices did begin to be valorised within the literary canon, it was often within the world of the novel—Madame de Lafayette and Jane Austen are two such examples. Although the presence of women in the Italian poetic canon is sometimes less evident, however, this is not to say that they are entirely absent. The twentieth century was a time of huge transformation in the world of Italian literature and poetry. The combination of two world wars and an oppressive fascist regime, coupled with women’s suffrage being achieved in 1945, created a changeable literary landscape conductive to experimentation, allowing women to become the creators of poetry rather than mere subjects.
One such woman is Antonia Pozzi, born in Milan in 1912 to a noble family. She began writing poetry during her teenage years, but her works have only been rediscovered and studied in recent decades. I only discovered Pozzi’s work a couple of weeks ago as a part of my lecture course on contemporary Italian poetry that I am taking at the University of Siena. After sixteen hours of lectures, Pozzi was the first female poet discussed as a part of the course, and also the first of the so-called “second generation” of poets of the Novecento (those born between 1911 and 1924). I was thus struck by the fact that her poetic style was a little different to those I had seen before, and she seemed to signal a change not just in style, but in who was allowed to write poetry.
Antonia Pozzi, May 1937. Source: Centro Internazionale Insubrico “Carlo Cattaneo” e “Giulio Preti”
Pozzi attended the University of Milan, where she met and studied with key philosophers like Antonio Banfi. It was also here that she became friends with poet Vittorio Sereni, to whom she had a similar poetic style. She studied languages and literature, writing her thesis on French realist novelist Gustave Flaubert and graduating in 1935.
Pozzi lived her formative years in a time of political and social upheaval, which had a profound impact on her work. The Italian leggi razziali (racial laws) came into force in 1938 under the fascist regime. These laws existed to enforce racism and discrimination largely against Italian Jews and meant the restriction of the civil rights of Jews in Italy; their books were banned, they were excluded from education and holding public office, and foreign Jews were exiled, among many other rules. Pozzi was profoundly affected by the racial laws; although she was not personally targeted by them, many of her friends were. She wrote to her friend Vittorio Sereni, “forse l’età delle parole è finita per sempre” (“perhaps the age of words is over forever”), highlighting her despair at the situation her country found itself in under the fascist regime.
Such was her feeling of hopelessness that she took her own life on 3rd December 1938, at the age of just twenty-six. Her family refused to register her death as suicide, claiming it would bring scandal onto the family; her father destroyed her will after her death and heavily edited much of her poetry which remained unpublished at the time of her death.
Stylistically, Pozzi’s poetry seems not to align with any particular group, instead combining aspects from a variety of genres. She has been called neoromantic, as her poetry may be described as an example of the Great Romantic Lyric, poetry written realistically about a real-world situation. However, she has also been placed into the genre of confessional poetry, aligning her with English-language poets like Sylvia Plath, in that her poetry has a narrative quality, exposing and discussing personal experiences and sentiments. I believe that this is the most pertinent way of looking at Pozzi’s poetry; her experiences and relationships are central to her poetry.
Unlike many poets of this era who used the hendecasyllabic lines common in Italian poetry, Pozzi’s poetry was metrically and rhythmically free. Her lines and verses tend to vary greatly in length, and she uses strategically placed enjambments to highlight the elements she felt were most important.
Her style is in many ways similar to her contemporaries, including her friend Vittorio Sereni (born 1913), who also put his personal experiences into poetry when he was imprisoned in Algeria during the Second World War. While earlier poets had preferred to focus on interrogating and transcending the real world, Pozzi’s generation of Novecento poets place reality and lived experience at the centre of their work; poets such as Zanzotto (b. 1921) and Fortini (b. 1917) also demonstrate this tendency. Pozzi’s poetry is also often situated topographically, like the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922); poems such as Via dei Cinquecento (named for a real street in an impoverished area of Milan) combine observance of the city with poetic subjectivity.
The below poem, Novembre, written in Milan in October 1930, is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in its use of the em dash and yet retains a striking originality in comparison to other poets of the Italian Novecento. It demonstrates Pozzi’s capacity to observe the world around her while retaining a personal subjectivity in her writing; her connection to her city is clear, as is her longing for signs of hope in politically turbulent times. This is, I think, a message that continues to resonate with the times we are living in today.
November
Antonia Pozzi, Translated by Peter Robinson
And then – if it happens I go away –
there’ll remain something
of me
in my world –
there’ll remain a slender wake of silence
amid the voices –
a tenuous breath of white
at the heart of azure –
And one November evening
a frail little girl
at a street corner
will sell so many chrysanthemums
and there’ll be the stars
ice-cold, green, remote –
Someone will cry
who knows where – who knows where –
Someone will search out chrysanthemums
for me
in the world
when it happens that without return
I’ll have to go away.
Novembre
Antonia Pozzi
E poi – se accadrà ch’io me ne vada –
resterà qualchecosa
di me
nel mio mondo –
resterà un’esile scìa di silenzio
in mezzo alle voci –
un tenue fiato di bianco
in cuore all’azzurro –
Ed una sera di novembre
una bambina gracile
all’angolo d’una strada
venderà tanti crisantemi
e ci saranno le stelle
gelide verdi remote –
Qualcuno piangerà
chissà dove – chissà dove –
Qualcuno cercherà i crisantemi
per me
nel mondo
quando accadrà che senza ritorno
io me ne debba andare.
More about Pozzi’s life and work:
Particular recommendations of Pozzi’s poetry: Via dei Cinquecento, Bellezza, Confidare, Preghiera alla Poesia
