D'Annunzio and Yeats

Abstract

These proceedings are appropriately dedicated to the memory of Alphonse Sammut, whose posthumous but newly published volume of Anglo-Italian bibliography brings home well to readers the apparently inexhaustible vogue for seeking out the sources and echoes which run through great creative literature. It is a search (for some a "pursuit" in every sense), which stimulates curiosity (or hostility) in readers, and occasionally casts additional light on the meaning or significance of a work of literature, as well as amusing the individual researchers. I should give prior warning that the result of my own investigations into Yeats and D' Annunzio has not produced a neatly-packaged and satisfying bundle of "inter- textualities", but I hope that what I have to say may reflect curiously on the literary scene in London at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps also my work may go some way to explaining why, despite the blaze of publicity for D' Annunzio in the 1890s, there has persisted an almost total ignorance of his poetry in Britain outside a narrow academic minority. Certainly there was an almost total lack of translation of his verse, until the lyric collection Alcyone was Englished in 1988, a good century after the first poems of that anthology were written.