Mention Guido Gozzano to almost any Italian you meet, and you are apt to be answered with a look of immediate recognition, perhaps even a smile of appreciation. From Calabria to Trent he is everywhere esteemed by people who have been brought up reading him in the high schools and universities, and who return to him periodically to renew the pleasure of their initial acquaintance. Yet the moment you step outside of the peninsula, you will probably be met with only a blank look when you utter his name even among people with an active interest in modern poetry. Thus we should be grateful to Carcanet for bringing out this English edition of Gozzano’s most important book of poems, The Colloquies, together with a selection of his letters. For if ever there was a poet who deserved a wider—that is to say, international—audience, that poet is Guido Gozzano.

One of the causes of Gozzano’s success in Italy, aside from his literary excellence, has been that he, like Rupert Brooke in England, appeared to incarnate everyone’s idea of how a poet should look and act and live. In the forty pages of letters that J. C. Nichols has included with his translation of The Colloquies, we find Gozzano, curiously, far more theatrical and self-conscious than he is in his poems. In his pursuit of the beautiful poetess Amalia Guglielminetti, for example, he carries his posturing almost to the point of parody, portraying himself as D’Annunzio’s superuomoor