Orphic Songs

Dino Campana, who has been compared to Rimbaud, was the wild man of Italian poetry in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The war saved some young Italians from rebellion and for Fascism, but not Campana. Always an outsider, he dropped out of school and discovered the individualism, ecstatic conception, and democratic humanity of Whitman. At the age of twenty-two, Campana went to sea, then became a vagabond, working sporadically as gaucho, miner, fireman, organ-grinder, janitor, circus tumbler...