The Poetic Thought of Felice Mastroianni: The Mediterranean as a Metaphor

By Antonio Bagnato

About twenty years ago, on April 21, 1882, Felice Mastroianni died. He was one of the Calabrians who, together with Franco Costabile, Lorenzo Calogero and a few others left an indelible mark on the poetry of the 1900s. He was born at Platania in 1914, on the slopes of the Reventino, a “little town of a little poet, which made life itself into a solitary and secret tale,” as he himself said when writing about “a land of men always living.”

Already in 1935, fascinated by the poetry of Leopardi, he published L’infinito leopardiano (The Infinite Leopardian), an extremely interesting essay that, even today, despite the growing number of studies about the poet from Recanati, still offers an important and descriptive interpretation of Leopardi’s pain and pessimism. This was his debut in the field of criticism, from which followed other writings such as Coscienza cristiana di Ulisse dantesco (The Christian Conscience of a Dantean Ulysses) in 1939, Filippo Greco, l’ultimo dei romantici calabrese (Filippo Greco, Last of the Calabrian Romantics) in 1966, and Prose dell’antiquario (The Antiquarian’s Writings) published posthumously by Rubbettino in 2001. His most intensive poetic activity took place, for the most part, during the years he spent in Naples between 1963 and 1968.

In Naples, the Pathenopean city, he wrote collections of poetry that won him prestigious prizes and thus brought his writings to the attention of authoritative critics and other poets. But Naples is also a city that confirms a poet’s awareness of the rupture that exists in the human condition between the rhythm of the metropolis and the rhythms of the small towns, especially the small towns in Calabria. His poetry, which contains practically no references to socio-economic specifics, takes on a character that is markedly lyrical-existential, and becomes an almost-always endurable dialogue with the contradictions of dehumanizing modernism, in an effort to recover “the genuineness of ancient fable.”

His interest in and fascination with Magna Graecia and more generally with its Greekness even led him to write in neo-Greek language. He published three neo-Hellenic collections of poetry, which aroused great interest both in Italy and in Greece, and which garnered him prestigious awards and important recognition. In the 1983-1984 cycle of the international Dante Alighieri awards, where Mircea Eliade and Guilherme Figuereido received prizes, the jury decided to award a special prize to Felice Mastroianni in memory of his neo-Greek output, with the following citation: “A singular and truly exemplary aspect of the lyrical efforts of Felice Mastroianni.”

Handshake between Felice Mastroianni and Mario Luzi, respectively
1st and 2nd prize-winners of the National Poetry Prize “Sebeto,” June 6, 1966, Naples

If Matroianni, as an Italia poet, was thus able to earn the friendship and admiration of a leading poet of the caliber of Mario Luzi, still, as a neo-Greek poet, he had to carry out all alone the tiring and joyous ascent up the ancient rocks of the language of the gods, that is of Greek but with an Erasmian cadence, before descending once again to the far off and unknown plain of a new language, disenchanted but re-sung, with a spirit that can say to itself, as if at the end of an odyssey, “but how far you have traveled, oh my soul.”