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

Mastroianni’s voluminous poetic output has been organized in two volumes published posthumously: Quest’ombra sul terreno (This Shadow on the Ground) (ed. Ligeia, Lamezia Terme 1983) and Trilogia neoellenica (Neo-Hellenic Trilogy) (ed. Delphica Tetradia, Athens 1983). In 2001 Rubbettino published ‘U cantu ‘ngola (Il canto nella gola) Prose del antiquario (A Song in the throat; Writings of an Antiquarian). Other important but yet-unedited works of Mastroianni are expected to see the light--soon we hope.

If it is true that our very self is formed and built on the basis of one’s ethos, on one’s system of values, and on the models of comportment of one’s community, it must also be true that often the fusion of modernity and tradition produces a synthesis that is lacking in such virtue. That is, modernity, even in its positive aspects, has been strong enough to fracture an important part of our ties with our primordial roots and with those humanly based values which have the power to keep men and their communities always alive; these are the values of compassion and solidarity.

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From this come uncertainty and bewilderment, but also the exigencies of poetry that knows how to communicate, to ask, and to seek to replace any absence of communication in order to recover those values that seem to be definitively lost, and to overcome the dehumanization of relationships. But the many of those poets who abound today risk "banalizing" both the poetic message and poetry itself. Addressing this point, Mastroianni in Poeti nuovi delle prose dell’antiquario (New Poets of Antiquarian Writings) writes, “Regarding poetry, I have never given credit to the myth of the so-called ‘new’ poet, even less today when ‘novelty’ is a malicious (and so puerile) game of irreverent and insensitive experimentation, a game that depends on the tricks of journalistic critics, conjurers and circus barkers, and are all well reimbursed by mercantile publishers.” He then adds that there are some true poets around today, but they “keep themselves concealed as much as possible, so as not to give place to a showy and fanciful publicity game on those literary occasions, which are more or less ‘pathological’ and which yield monetary returns to mercantile publishers with the complicity of glib critics and naïve readers.” The poetry of Mastroianni seeks to be something that is read as an original personal communication, and not solely as an expression of nature. It’s a creation of verse that starts on the daily commonplace of little things, and knows how to transcend them to assume a universal dimension.

Thus Platania, Calabria, Magna Graecia, ancient Greece, and the Mediterranean, lose their concrete specificity, and assume a metaphoric and therefore universal dimension. In such a way poetry becomes an unveiling of hidden being, as Martin Heidegger would say. It’s a profoundly lyric poetry, that of Mastroianni, but it also has a philosophical and civil content, even if not specifically stated. For poetry, if profoundly human, cannot avoid compromising itself with the world. In the poet from Platania there is a pessimistic conception of the world and of life, because it doesn’t know enough to put itself “in the face of present reality without a moral attitude of distrust and, conversely, of mourning for the past and for my history as a man.” (Notes on dialectical poetry in ‘U canto in gola; Prose dell’antiquario, op.cit. p.11). It is a distrust that, however, does not translate automatically into nihilism. If this world is a place of exile, where the gods are dead and the fairies of the Reventino have disappeared, they are still invoked, and it is still possible to catch a glimpse of a light, like a firefly, that perhaps might illuminate both the road and one’s life as well.