He
exercised upon the poetry of his day an influence favorable to lyric
naturalness, and his ballads were long popular.
IV
GIOVANNI BERCHET was a poet who alone ought to be enough to take from
the Lombard romanticists the unjust reproach of "resignation". "Where
our poetry," says De Sanctis, "throws off every disguise, romantic
or classic, is in the verse of Berchet.... If Giovanni Berchet had
remained in Italy, probably his genius would have remained enveloped
in the allusions and shadows of romanticism. But in his exile at
London he uttered the sorrow and the wrath of his betrayed and
vanquished country. It was the accent of the national indignation
which, leaving the generalities of the sonnets and the ballads,
dramatized itself and portrayed our life in its most touching phases."
Berchet's family was of French origin, but he was the most Italian of
Italians, and nearly all his poems are of an ardent political tint and
temperature. Naturally, he spent a great part of his life in exile
after the Austrians were reestablished in Milan; he was some time in
England, and I believe he died in Switzerland.
I have most of his patriotic poems in a little book which is curiously
historical of a situation forever past. I picked it up, I do not
remember where or when, in Venice; and as it is a collection of pieces
all meant to embitter the spirit against Austria, it had doubtless not
been brought into the city with the connivance of the police.
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