Dei Sepolcri (Of the Sepulchres): the author's critical interventions

The first edition of the poem came out with a Note d’Autore (Note by  the Author) which Foscolo wrote “onde rischiarare le allusioni alle cose contemporanee ed indicare da quali fonti ha ricavato le tradizioni antiche” ("in order to risk allusions to contemporary things and indicate from what sources the ancient traditions have been derived"); among the sources he focuses principally on are the Latin and Greek classics, mentioning only quickly contemporary poets in order to underline the absolute originality of the work which, while reworking well known themes such as the theme of the sepulchre, the defence of poetry and tradition, was presented as an absolutely innovative synthesis; the author also provides interpretations for help the understanding of some obscure passages of text regarding episodes of contemporary history, or to allow the reader to recognize the characters evoked, including some illustrious Italians who are often not explicitly mentioned.

Despite the Note d’Autore, one of the criticisms of the poem regards the obscurity of some passages; in this regard the article by Aimé Guillon that came out in the “Giornale Italiano” of June 22 1807 was particularly polemical, censuring the obscure language, the excess of erudition and the text's incongruence. Foscolo responded in Lettera a M. Guillon su la sua Competenza a Giudicare i Poeti Italiani (Letter to M. Guillon on his Competence in Judging Italian Poets), in which he proposed an interpretive hypothesis absorbing the poem's complex meaning into a radical synthesis of the aspects of style, content, subject, image creation and allegoric language. To create this synthesis the work needed "combinations", i.e. associations of ideas, images and narrative insertions that had the aim of making the message more effective, and of "transitions", quick passages from one subject to another that could appear disharmonious, but in reality underlined the work's main ideas. In this way the author transmitted his vision of the truth persuasively, exposing it in a asystematic way, although always extremely controlled at the rhetorical and linguistic levels.