Confronting poetics: Theories and paths of modernity from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio

The research illustrated in these pages intends to contribute to the identification of some themes and paths emerging in the concept of modernity. In particular, how a new conscience of literary modernity and, broadly speaking, the essence of modernity became established in Italy at the end of the XIX century through the figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Fundamental in this course was a comparison with the motifs and themes inspiring the works of Baudelaire. This comparison between the two authors is only partially genealogical. It is mostly concerned with the return, sometimes unconsciously, to common archetypes and images proposed in different languages and rhetorical forms such as allegories and symbolism, that is, in conceptual and expressive forms that do not comply with modernity but still are not antithetic. The basis of these references lies in the “living memory” of a D’Annunzio who certainly read attentively the works of Baudelaire. Both authors propose their conscience of modernity as the knowledge of the past (golden dawning of the world) measured in distance and decline, but also the necessity of recovery through its fullest medium, the myth. The modernism of bourgeois culture carries within a natural instability and obsession with the past and ancient times and can be identified by a sense of decadence in this respect.;The theoretical and artistic paths of the two authors meet around the figure of Richard Wagner, with the mediation of Nietzsche, for D’Annunzio. Wagner is the example of man afflicted by modernity, the “mystic gulf” of music theorized in his works as the aesthetic reformation of modern art. For Baudelaire Wagner represented the artist whose mastership summed the ancient and the modern in an ideal mysticism of hell and heaven. For D’Annunzio, Wagner’s music liberated the hidden forces of the mind (the unconscious as we would say, after Freud) and has the great value of revealing modern man to himself.;Another section is dedicated to the comparison of the great themes of travel and dreams, represented as allegories and symbols. While for Baudelaire, travel is an imaginary experience of navigation towards a void where the subject is engulfed by the allegory of distance and loss, for D’Annunzio navigation and the accompanying imagination-dream are a way of recovering the cosmic center of the body itself. In D’Annunzio’s symbolic representation, the devouring subject englobes the terms of infinite analogies with the world until the “self-body” becomes its extreme symbol. Approaching in the same way the female sphere, the conjunction of an unresolved dualism, D’Annunzio becomes acquainted with the poetry of Baudelaire and makes several references even in the use of certain titles such as “Sed non satiatus” (La Chimera) using the male voice for Baudelaire’s “Sed non satiata.” The comparison leads to an analysis of the poet’s ambivalence, androgynous and sterile. Eroticism becomes the place where the poetic “ego” confronts itself and the negation of self. The modernity of D’Annunzio delves further into the female sphere in his quest for the “hieroglyphic body” of light.