The Romantic polemic

In July 1816, Biblioteca Italiana, the conservative and pro-Austria Milanese literary journal edited by Giuseppe Acerbi, published an article by the French writer Madame De Staël (1766-1817) inviting Italian authors to translate modern European literature rather than remain fossilized within their own tradition which, although noble, was in need of renewal in both content and language. The invitation was a general encouragement to attend to the far-reaching transformations in culture and society that had taken place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the arrival of Romanticism, which the famous baroness herself had helped spread, from its emergence in the North (Germany and England), to Southern Europe including Italy. Her article aroused immediate controversy. The classicists responded with moderate and reasonable replies, but also revealed reactionary and offensive attitudes. The Romantics on the other hand produced noteworthy manifestoes, thanks to intellectuals such as Ludovico di Breme, Pietro Borsieri and Giovanni Berchet (all three later promoting the Conciliatore). Manzoni himself did not take part directly in the public debate, but wrote a poem, L’ira di Apollo, in which he portrays Apollo as irritated by Romantic ideas of poetry, which excluded mythology. Manzoni later spoke at length against the classicist use of mythology in his letter to D’Azeglio On Romanticism, ridiculing their recourse to myths and the “ancient tales” (beloved by Leopardi) in his novel. Manzoni and Ermes Visconti together wrote (in 1817) a scherzo di conversazione parodying canto XVI of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, making fun of certain emphatic and extreme forms of language used in love poetry which had moved from classicism into melodrama. This parody led to a note of friendly disapproval from Grossi, who like other Romantics admired Tasso’s “pathetic” style.