Literary conversion

Between his return from Paris and spring 1812, Manzoni’s poetic inspiration came to a halt. He no longer appeared concerned with literature, but devoted his energies to renovating the villa at Brusuglio, studying philosophy, religion and history, and reading the works of Bossuet and other seventeenth century orators on sacred and moral questions and Italian authors such as Machiavelli and Giannone (whose works were on the Index of Prohibited Books, meaning that Manzoni needed permission from Pope Pius VII to read them). His detachment from literature was merely superficial, however. His religious conversion had generated a need to transfer his new spirituality to literature and create work that was entirely different from his earlier output, and written (as promised in a letter to Degola) “for the glory of God”. His need to write a new kind of poetry was already evident in his criticisms to Fauriel of his poem Urania (the most neoclassical of his early poems), which he claimed he was “very dissatisfied, especially on account of its total lack of interest”. What interested him, although only briefly, in the period following his return to Milan, was the poetic genre known as the “idyll”, produced in the latter half of the eighteenth century by Italian poets such as Bertòla, and German-language poets such as Gessner. Manzoni had discussed this poetic genre with Fauriel in Paris, and in Milan discussed it with Monti and other literary figures, but refused to translate into Italian the Danish poet Jens Baggesen’s idyll Parthenais, already translated into French by Fauriel. He set to work instead on a poem in octave stanzas on vaccine, a novelty both in metrical structure and clear social commitment (and indirectly religious) which he had thought about in Paris, but he wrote only around sixty lines. Not even La Vaccina constituted the kind of poetry “pulled from the bottom of the heart” which he had declared so urgently in a letter to Fauriel on 20 April 1812. His real literary conversion took place almost overnight, with the first lines of his Risurrezione.