The Longest Day: Dino Campana and Walt Whitman Across Italy and South America

ACCORDING TO ROGER ASSELINEAU, Dino Campana (1885-1932), author of the collection Canti Orfici [Orphic Songs] (1914),1 was the Italian poet most influenced by Walt Whitman.2 Yet, the connections between these poets have not been thoroughly explored nor have critics assessed the implications of Campana's decision to take Leaves of Grass with him in 1907, when he left from Genoa on a ship for Argentina in what would become his transformative journey to South America.3Campana-who has been regarded (and perhaps stereotypically stigmatized) as the Italian poete maudit par excellence, because of his mental illness,4 his extravagant and rebellious ways of living, his turbulent social interactions, and the explosive power of his poetic voice-was, with this journey, abandoning himself once again to the roaming life that he deeply loved. But this time the poet was going much farther than on previous sojourns to Paris, or Switzerland, or Mount of La Verna in the Tuscan Apennines, which he loved to climb and get lost in for weeks. This time, Campana was going far away to start a new life in the American hemisphere that he had encountered through the words of Whitman, so it was fitting to bring Leaves of Grass along. With reference to his journeys and experiences in South America, Campana wrote with a mythopoetical and very Whitmanian perception of the American landscape and its imminent potential (especially in the poems "Journey to Montevideo," "Pampas," "A Trolley Ride to America and Back," "Dualism," and in the early draft of "Pampas," "The Fiery Train on the Tawny Pampas").5 These poems can be read as Campana's creative response to Whitman's idea of "America" as the source of an extra-European newness, freedom, and regeneration. For Campana, just as for Whitman, to be a poet in "America" and of "America" meant to move toward modernity and experimentation, to embody a bardic voice that sings a future land of equality and democracy, to pursue a personal, social, political, and also creative liberation.6Dino Campana represented a figure of radical alterity within the context of the avant-gardist Italian literary scene of his time-a scene that he repeatedly and desperately tried to enter, but also a scene from which he naturally stood out because of his highly idiosyncratic manner, characterized by a mixture of stylistic innovations and archaisms and by a daring expressionist tone. Although he studied in a prestigious grammar school in Faenza, took part in university cultural life in Bologna, and did his novitiate in the Florentine avant-garde circles that gathered around the literary magazines Lacerba and La Voce and the literary cafe "Giubbe Rosse," Campana refused to adhere to the literary edicts of the Italian futurist avant-gardes that rejected the values of the nineteenth century and that urged the emergence of a new intellectual class ready to make sense of the new industrial society. As a result, Campana was shunned and misunderstood by these circles during his lifetime and also excluded from the mainstream canon after his premature death. His poetic vision remains singular. Labels classifying him as the "Italian Rimbaud" or "visionary poet" have done as much to distort our understanding of his work as have the harsh words of the poet Umberto Saba, who judged Campana to be "crazy, only crazy."7 We should recognize Campana instead as someone with serious mental issues that had the effect of radicalizing his verse and making it, as poet and critic Edoardo Sanguineti said, "enact a sort of cultural sabotage that led [him] to be completely alone to face things in their nakedness."8Eugenio Montale's description of Campana as "a tramp who read Rimbaud and Whitman"9 (and, we could add, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, Goethe, and Nietzsche) reminds us that, while spending weeks hiking in the mountains, incarcerated for months here and there, and travelling penniless around Europe and South America, Campana imbibed from the very sources of western poetic modernity,10 and one key source was Whitman. …