The thought and poetics of the Italian poet, novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni encompass the entirety of the writer's poetic, stylistic, linguistic ideas and ideological convictions as they evolved from his Jacobin and neoclassical beginnings until his death. After the neoclassical period, which saw Manzoni engage in odes and other poetic production until 1810, he joined the Romantic movement from that year, becoming one of its leading exponents. During the so-called Quindicennio creativo ("Creative Fifteen Years", 1812–1827), Manzoni produced literary, poetic, theatrical, and nonfiction works that profoundly changed the genetics of Italian literature and his own literary language, imposing himself as a milestone in the history of Italian literature. Between 1827 and his death in 1873, Manzoni continued his research, writing historical-literary essays in contrast to his early ones and, at the same time, reflecting on the nature of the "living" Italian language in the context of the new Kingdom of Italy.
Enlightenment and neoclassical beginnings
At the schools of the Somaschi and Barnabite priests, Manzoni received a classical education, based on the study of the great Latin and Italian classics: Virgil, Horace, Petrarch and Dante were among the most studied authors,.. and the neoclassicism then prevailing in Italian literary culture fostered its rooting in the students' souls. The young Manzoni admired the two greatest exponents of neoclassical culture: Giuseppe Parini, whose death he was greatly affected by, and Vincenzo Monti, who visited the students at the Longone boarding school,: absorbing from them the poetic stylistic features that would distinguish his poetry throughout the early 1800s, from Trionfo della Libertà to Urania.See, in general, The relationship with Monti, from a human and poetic point of view, is fully seen in a letter dated September 15, 1803, in which the young Manzoni submits literary material to him:
Despite these encounters with Monti, little of neoclassicism remains in Manzoni's poetics. Strongly imbued with the tradition of the Lombard Enlightenment (Manzoni was a nephew, on Giulia Beccaria's side, of the well-known jurisconsult Cesare), Manzoni, following the formation of Jacobin circles in Milan and contact with the more radical Enlightenment tradition, reports in relation to the Lombard Enlightenment atmosphere of the 1890s: adhered until the last years of the first decade of the nineteenth century to an Enlightenment skepticism in the field of religion (associated with the negative existential experience he received at boarding school),: in which the value for freedom advocated by revolutionary ideals predominated..For a broader view of the anti-monarchist and Jacobin production of the adolescent Manzoni, see . Decisive for this turning point was his meeting in Milan with the Neapolitan exiles Vincenzo Cuoco (who introduced him to Vico's philosophical thought). and Francesco Lomonaco;. in Paris, from 1805 onward, with the group of Idéologues headed by Pierre de Cabanis and Claude Fauriel, intellectuals who were spokesmen for the Enlightenment sensist heritage and headed by Helvétius, Condillac, Voltaire and Rousseau. and attentive to certain social demands..
Between Enlightenment and Romanticism
After the conversion
Following his conversion in 1810, Manzoni broke with part of the secular culture heir to the Enlightenment, while maintaining its more moderate aspects. Manzoni's poetic-literary parabola, as with other Italian Romantics, did not lean toward a total break with the 18th-century Enlightenment tradition. On the contrary, after his contact with Fauriel and the other idéologues, Manzoni did indeed absorb those characteristic traits proper to the nascent Romanticism (attention to nature, the world of the "small," emotional spontaneity), but he filtered them with the paideutic-educational contributions proper to the teachings of Parini, his grandfather Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri.. To all this was added the rediscovery of Christian ethics, entailing the poetic chorality and divine omnipresence in the soul of Creation that does not nullify, but strengthens in Manzoni the bond between Enlightenment reason (which failed, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic experiences) and the believer's need to rely on the One who rules the world.:
Manzonian Enlightenment: from Jacobin beginnings to the Letter on Romanticism Following from his youth canons of the Milanese Enlightenment and the Accademia dei Trasformati,Parini's influence on Manzoni's early production is reflected in the ode In morte di Carlo Imbonati, in which similarities echo with the moral exhortation expounded by Parini in the ode Sull'educazione, dedicated precisely to Imbonati, who was a pupil of the Brianza poet. Cf. . Manzoni also became a spokesman for the figure of the civically engaged intellectual, emphasizing the ethical aspect that the scholar can take on within the civil community: the latter must collaborate with government on the path of reform to improve the condition of the people, as Parini had done forty years earlier.: This kind of morally committed literature can be seen in a letter sent to Fauriel in 1806, where a very young Manzoni complains about the state of decadence of Italian society, something for which "Writers cannot produce the effect that they (I mean the good ones) propose, that is, to educate the multitude, to make them enamored of what is beautiful and useful, and to make things in this way a little more as they should be." This civil and moral conception of literature, in addition to the poetic evidence of the Civil Odes of 1814 and 1821, is revived in the more mature Letter on Romanticism sent to Marquis Cesare d'Azeglio (1823),. in which Manzoni reiterates the social value that a work of literary art must have as its main purpose:
Romantic influence The Romantic element in Manzoni's poetic production emerges, for the first time, in the Sacred Hymns, where the poet's ego eclipses in favor of a choral universality that raises his cry of hope and trust to God.. . The Romantic conversion, as critic Ezio Raimondi points out, stems from his conversion to Catholicism, a factor that "obliges Manzoni to make a radical choice even with regard to poetry," bringing about a change of course from the neoclassicism of Urania..
History In addition to the "ecclesial" dimension of Manzoni's religiosity, one cannot forget the fundamental contribution of the French historiography of Fauriel and other ideologues. Indeed, these advocated a history no longer centered on the great men of history, but rather on the humble, the small ones who are lost in the oblivion of time because they are not the object of interest by their contemporary chroniclers and are the object of violence by the decisions of the powerful..: The same is true, accordingly, for historical facts: the acquaintance with Augustin Thierry, which took place in Paris between 1819 and 1820, "represents for Manzoni the sample of documentary and philological research, for the most part destined to the discovery of the social history that was set to be a fascinating intellectual novelty.". The same is true for the historical facts. Such "social history," investigated through the historical-philological method of the ideologues and expressed in the Discorso sulla storia longobardica in Italia, the real historical basis for the drama of Adelchi,. will later find its highest expression in Fermo e Lucia and then in The Betrothed.:
For Manzoni, history has a sacred value:Tellini defines Manzoni as "an author obsessed with scrupulous adherence to historical facts." it must not be altered on the basis of the necessity of poetic ingenuity, but must coexist with the latter without altering the proper turn of events. As he would declare in his Letter to Monsieur Chauvet:
The poetic object: the poetic truth and the historical truth
At the same time, however, Manzoni's poetic statement is not intended to diminish the value of poetic ingenuity. In fact, a little later in the discussion, Manzoni poses the hypothetical question of what might be left for the poet if the inventio of creating the substrate of the story is taken away from him,: giving as his answer his definition of what poetry was:
With such a declaration of poetics, Manzoni definitively delineates the boundary separating the two areas that the poet must deal with and that will be the basis of the novel: the poetic truth and the historical truth. The former "must inquire into the feelings with which men experience events and into those aspects of history which escape true and proper historiography.". The latter, is the historical material, objectively true and historically investigable, the "truth by subject" recalled in the Letter on Romanticism.
If the subject, then, must be the truth, there can be no room for the mythology hitherto used in the field of poetry.Manzoni, shortly before, had recalled that the Greeks, whose use of mythology by today's poets was condemned as a falsification of history according to the tools of modern research, regarded myths (whose Greek word, mythos, means precisely "true") as true history: : Not only because this would contradict the principles just before expressed about historical truth, but the very ethical-religious basis of one who professes to be a Christian, as Cesare Goffis notes regarding the young Manzoni's change of opinion toward Urania.
Manzoni and Italian Romanticism
The dispute between Romantics and Classicists The years following the conversion were very significant for the Italian literary and cultural landscape. Italy, still anchored in a firm classicist tradition thanks to the past teachings of authors such as Parini and Alfieri, and contemporary ones such as Monti's, was forced to confront the new European Romantic temperament. In January 1816, the French intellectual Madame de Staël published, translated by Pietro Giordani in the first issue of the literary journal the Biblioteca Italiana, an article entitled Sulla maniera e la utilità delle traduzioni, in which she attacked the Italians' stubborn adherence to vacuous rhetoric, ignoring instead the literary novelties coming from Germany and England.. In the subsequent dispute between classicists (led by Pietro Giordani) and romantics (including Ludovico di Breme and Giovanni Berchet), Manzoni did not actively participate. Although he was openly on the side of the Romantics (the ode L'ira di Apollo testifies, in an ironic key, to the wrath of the pagan god of poetry for being excluded from the poetic texts) and participated in the Cameretta letteraria organized by Ermes Visconti, Gaetano Cattaneo, Tommaso Grossi and, above all, the dialectal poet Carlo Porta,. Manzoni refused to collaborate openly with both the Biblioteca Italiana and the successor to the first magazine, Il Conciliatore. In addition to his ever-growing interest in formulating a Christian poetics and the beginning of investigations into the theatrical genre, the depressive neurosis that struck Manzoni, for the first time, in 1810 (on the occasion of the loss of Enrichetta) and, in an increasingly debilitating way, in the following years, were also decisive: agoraphobic disorders, panic attacks, fainting spells and difficulty speaking in public had undermined his interpersonal relationships, forcing him to a quiet and withdrawn life in his estates in Brusuglio or in the quiet of his Milanese palace..
Relationships with Porta and the Cameretta