Poetry

Many people in Italy lived the 1970s as an anticlimax, in some respects a frightening one as economic recession and political violence crept up the agenda. It was seen as a period of ‘riflusso’, both of reaction and of withdrawal, on the part of many intellectuals, from the social and above all political activism of the late 1960s. It was a period of widespread cynicism about politics in general and revolutionary politics(including cultural politics) in particular, and one in which it became necessary, if not inevitable, that priority should be given to private rather than public concerns, individual rather than historical issues.

There are indeed a number of symptoms of such a trend in the poetry written and published during the decade. It is not only in relation to poetry, however, that it is probably more accurate to speak of a redefinition of the relationship between the personal and the political, the individual and the historical, and of each one of these terms, rather than to imagine a cut-and-dried antithesis between predetermined entities. In many cases, indeed, there is a politicisation of the (hitherto) personal domain.