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17th-century literature

The 17th century in Italian literature was traditionally described as a period of "decadence" in which writers who were devoid of sentiment resorted to exaggeration and tried to cloak the poverty of their subject matter beneath an exuberance of form. (In this period, it is said, freedom of thought and expression was fettered by the Counter-Reformation, by the political supremacy of Spain, and by the conservatism of the Accademia della Crusca, whose aim it was to ensure the hegemony of Florence by promoting the "purity" of the Tuscan language. The "baroque" style of writing was not, however, simply an Italian phenomenon. It was at this time that Gongorism (the ingenious metaphorical style of the poet Luis de Góngora) flourished in Spain and the witty "conceits" of the Metaphysical poets were popular in England. Far from being exhausted, indeed, this was an extremely vital period, so much so that in the last decades of the 20th century a new and more comprehensive understanding of the literature of the Italian Baroque has been formulated by scholars conversant with the changing attitude toward this phase of civilization in Germany, France, and England.

Poetry and prose

The popularity of satire was a reaction against prevailing conditions. Prominent in this genre was the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa, who attacked in seven satires the vices and shortcomings of the age. The Modenese Alessandro Tassoni acquired great fame with La secchia rapita (1622; The Rape of the Bucket), a mock-heroic poem that is both an epic and a personal satire. The most serious poet of the period was Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, who spent most of his adult life in prison as a subversive. Campanella is perhaps less well known for his rough-hewn philosophical verse than for the Città del sole (1602; Campanella's City of the Sun), a vision of political utopia, in which he advocated the uniting of humanity under a theocracy based on natural religion.

The most successful and representative poet during this period was Giambattista Marino, author of a large collection of lyric verse ( La lira [1608-14; "The Lyre"] and La sampogna [1620; "The Syrinx"]) and a long mythological poem, (1623), in which the Ovidian myth of the love of Venus and Adonis, told by Shakespeare in 200 stanzas, is inflated by Marino to more than 8,000. Marino derived inspiration from the poetry of the late 16th century, but his aim-typical of the age-was to excite wonder by novelty. His work is characterized by "conceits" of fantastic ingenuity, far-fetched metaphor, sensuality, extreme facility, and a superb technical skill. His imitators were innumerable, and most 17th-century Italian poets were influenced by his work.

Gabriello Chiabrera, soberer in style than Marino, was successful in imitating the metres of classical poetry (especially of the Greek Pindar) and excelled in the composition of musical canzonette (rhymed poems with short lines modeled on the French Pléiade's adaptation of the Greek verse form known as the anacreontic). Toward the end of the century a patriotic sonneteer, Vincenzo da Filicaia, and Alessandro Guidi, who wrote exalted odes, were hailed as major poets and reformers of the excesses of the Baroque. Though they retained much of the earlier bombast, their consciousness of the need for rational reform led to the foundation of the Accademia dell'Arcadia.

Among prose writers of the period, the satirist Traiano Boccalini stood out with Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612-13; Advertisements from Parnassus) in the fight against Spanish domination. A history of the Council of Trent (which defined Catholic doctrines in reaction to the Reformation) was written by Paolo Sarpi, an advocate of the liberty of the Venetian state against papal interference, and a history of the rising of the Low Countries against Spain was written by Guido Bentivoglio. The Venetian novels of Girolamo Brusoni are still of interest, as are the travels of Pietro della Valle and the tales of the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile. All the restless energy of this period reached its climax in the work of Galileo, a scientist who laid the foundations of mathematical philosophy and earned a prominent place in the history of Italian literature through the vigour and clarity of his prose.

With the rise of the music drama and the opera, Italian authors worked to an increasing extent with the lyric stage. Librettos written by poets such as Ottavio Rinuccini were planned with dramatic and musical artistry. During the 17th century a popular spirit entered the opera houses: intermezzi (short dramatic or musical light entertainments) were required between the acts, a practice that undermined the dramatic unity of the performance as a whole, and toward the end of the century every vestige of theatrical propriety was abandoned. The spread of Marino's influence was felt by many to be an abuse. In 1690 the Accademia dell'Arcadia was founded in Rome for the express purpose of eradicating "bad taste." The purpose of the academy was in tune with a genuinely felt need. Many of its members were rationalist followers of René Descartes with severe classical sympathies, but their reaction consisted mainly in imitating the simplicity of the nymphs and shepherds who were supposed to have lived in the Golden Age, and thus a new artifice replaced an old one. A typical exponent of the Arcadian lyric was Pietro Metastasio, the 18th-century reformer of the operatic libretto.

Giovanni Pietro Giorgetti Anthony Oldcorn

18th-century developments

Reform of the tragic theatre

In 1713 Francesco Scipione Maffei, an antiquary of Verona, produced -a tragedy that met with great success and pointed the way toward reform of the Italian tragic theatre. Between 1726 and 1747 Antonio Conti-an admirer of Shakespeare-wrote four Roman tragedies in blank verse. It was not until 1775 and the success of his Cleopatra, however, that an important Italian tragedian finally emerged in the person of Vittorio Alfieri. In strong contrast with Metastasio's and Paolo Rolli's melodrammi-librettos set to music or sometimes performed as plays in their own right-Alfieri's tragedies are harsh, bitter, and unmelodious. He chose classical and biblical themes, and through his hatred of tyranny and love of liberty he aspired to move his audience with magnanimous sentiments and patriotic fervour. He is at his most profound in Saul (1782) and Mirra (1786). Alfieri's influence in the Romantic period and the Risorgimento was immense, and, like Carlo Goldoni, he wrote an important autobiography, which gives a revealing account of his struggles to provide Italy with a corpus of drama comparable to that of the other European nations.

Goldoni's reform of the comedy

Metastasio's reform of the operatic libretto was paralleled in the mid-18th century by Goldoni's reform of comedy. Throughout the 17th century the commedia dell'arte-a colourful pantomime of improvisation, singing, mime, and acrobatics, often performed by actors of great virtuosity-had gradually replaced regular comedy, but by the early 18th century it had degenerated into mere buffoonery and obscenity with stereotyped characters ( maschere, "masks") and mannerisms. The dialogue was mostly improvised, and the plot-a complicated series of stage directions, known as the scenario-dealt mainly with forced marriages, star-crossed lovers, and the intrigues of servants and masters. Goldoni succeeded in replacing this traditional type of theatre with written works whose wit and vigour are especially evident when the Venetian scene is portrayed in a refined form of the local dialect. Perhaps because of his prolific output his work has sometimes been thought of as lacking in depth. His social observation is acute, however, and his characters are beautifully drawn. La locandiera (1753; "The Innkeeper"; Eng. trans. Mirandolina), with its heroine Mirandolina, a protofeminist, has things to say about class and the position of women that can still be appreciated today. Goldoni's rival and bitter controversialist, fellow Venetian Carlo Gozzi (the reactionary brother of the more liberal journalist Gasparo), also wrote comedies, satirical verse, and an important autobiography. His Fiabe teatrali (1772; "Theatrical Fables") are fantastic and often satirical. Among them are L'amore delle tre melarance ( The Love for Three Oranges), later made into an opera by Sergey Prokofiev, and the original Turandot, later set to music by Giacomo Puccini.

The world of learning

Giambattista Vico, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Apostolo Zeno, and the already mentioned Scipione Maffei were writers who reflected the awakening of historical consciousness in Italy. Muratori collected the primary sources for the study of the Italian Middle Ages; Vico, in his Scienza nuova (1725-44; The New Science), investigated the laws governing the progress of the human race and from the psychological study of man endeavoured to infer the laws by which civilizations rise, flourish, and fall. Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli and Gerolamo Tiraboschi devoted themselves to literary history. Literary criticism also attracted attention; Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Vico, Maffei, Muratori, and several others, while advocating the imitation of the classics, realized that such imitation should be cautious and thus anticipated critical standpoints that were later to come into favour.

With the end of Spanish domination and the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment from France, political reforms were gradually introduced in various parts of Italy. The new spirit of the times led men-mainly of the upper middle class-to enquire into the mechanics of economic and social laws. The ideas and aspirations of the Enlightenment as a whole were effectively voiced in such organs of the new journalism as Pietro Verri's periodical (1764-66; "The Coffeehouse"). A notable contributor to Il Caffè was the philosopher and economist Cesare Beccaria, who in his pioneering book Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; On Crimes and Punishments) made an eloquent plea for the abolition of torture and the death penalty.

More than anyone else, Giuseppe Parini seems to embody the literary revival of the 18th century. In (published in four parts, 1763-1801; "The Day"), an ambitious but unfinished social satire of inherited wealth and nobility, he describes a day in the life of a young Milanese patrician and reveals with masterly irony the irresponsibility and futility of a whole way of life. His Odi (1795; "Odes"), which are imbued with the same spirit of moral and social reform, are among the classics of Italian poetry.

The satire in the Sermoni (1763; "Sermons") of Gasparo Gozzi (elder brother of Carlo) is less pungent, though directed at similar ends, and in his two periodicals-La Gazzetta veneta and L'Osservatore-he presented a lively chronicle of Venetian life and indicated a practical moral with much good sense. Giuseppe Baretti-an extremely controversial figure who published a critical journal called La Frusta letteraria ("The Literary Whip"), in which he castigated "bad authors"-had learned much through a lengthy sojourn in England, where his friendship with Samuel Johnson helped to give independence and vigour, if not always accuracy, to his judgments. The Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (1749-64; "Travels of Enrico Wanton"), a philosophical novel by the Venetian Zaccaria Seriman, which tells of an imaginary voyage in the manner of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire, was the most all-embracing satire of the time.

Anthony Oldcorn

Literary trends of the 19th century

The 19th century was a period of political ferment leading to Italian unification, and many outstanding writers were involved in public affairs. Much of the literature written with a political aim, even when not of intrinsic value, became part of Italy's national heritage and inspired not only those for whom it was written but all who valued freedom.

Foremost among writers in the early struggles for his country's unity and freedom from foreign domination was Ugo Foscolo, who reconciled passionate feeling with a formal perfection inspired by classical models. His Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802; The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) was an epistolary story, reminiscent of Goethe's Werther, of a young man forced to suicide by frustrated love for both a woman and his fatherland. It was extremely moving and popular, as was a poem, "Dei sepolcri" (1807; "On Sepulchres"), in which, in fewer than 300 lines, he wrote lyrically on the theme of the inspiration to be had from contemplating the tombs of the great, exhorting Italians to be worthy of their heritage. This poem influenced the Italian Risorgimento, or national revival, and a passage in which Florence was praised because it preserved in the church of Santa Croce the ashes of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo is still very popular in Italy. Two odes celebrating the divine quality of beauty, 12 sonnets ranking with the best of Petrarch's and Tasso's, and an unfinished poem, "Le grazie" ("The Graces"), also testified to Foscolo's outstanding poetic merit. As an exile in England from 1816 until his death in 1827, he wrote remarkable critical essays on Italian literature for English readers.

In Foscolo patriotism and classicism united to form a single fixed passion, but the eclectic Vincenzo Monti was outstanding for mobility of feeling. He saw danger to his country in the French Revolution and wrote Il pellegrino apostolico (1782; "The Apostolic Pilgrim") and In morte di Ugo Bassville (1793; The Penance of Hugo), usually known as La bassvilliana; Napoleon's victories aroused his praise in Prometeo (c. 1805; "Prometheus"), Il bardo della selva nera (1806; "The Bard of the Dark Wood"), and La spada di Federico II (1806; "The Sword of Frederick II"); in Il fanatismo and La superstizione (1797) he attacked the papacy; later he extolled the Austrians. Thus every great event made him change his mind, through lack of political conviction, yet he achieved greatness in La bellezza dell'universo (1781; "The Beauty of the Universe"), in the lyrics inspired by domestic affections, and in a translation of the a masterpiece of Neoclassical beauty.

Opposing movements

Melchiorre Cesarotti occupied a prominent position in the world of learning at the end of the 18th century, and his translations of James Macpherson's Ossian poetry, Poesie di Ossian (1763-72), influenced Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and others by their mysterious and gloomy fantasy, so alien to the classical inspiration; Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (1785; "Essay on the Philosophy of Languages") was an important essay in the dispute on the Italian language. The trend was toward pedantic classicism as a reaction against an excessive Gallicism favoured by some 18th-century writers. Among the purists was Antonio Cesari, who brought out a new enlarged edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca (the first Italian dictionary, published by the Accademia della Crusca in 1612). He wrote Sopra lo stato presente della lingua italiana (1810; "On the Present State of the Italian Language") and endeavoured to establish the supremacy of Tuscan and of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as models. But a Lombard school opposed this Tuscan supremacy. Monti, its leader, issued Proposta di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca (1817-26; "Proposal for Some Corrections and Additions to the Crusca Dictionary"), which attacked the Tuscanism of the Crusca. By contrast, the patriot Pietro Giordani-for a time a journalistic colleague of Monti-was a great exponent of purismo. His views did not stem from literary pedantry, however, but from a concern that all social groups throughout Italy should have a common means of communication. In this respect he was linguistically opposed to the great Romantic poet Carlo Porta, who lampooned the aristocracy and clergy and expressed sympathy with the humble and wretched in narrative poems composed not in Italian but in a lively Milanese dialect. All Italy took part in the disputes about language, literature, and politics.

An artificial form of classicism was associated with the Napoleonic domination of Italy, so that when Napoleon fell, forces antagonistic to classicism arose. Literary Romanticism had already won favour with the French, who erroneously thought themselves akin to the German Romantics. Between 1816 and 1818 a battle was fought for Romanticism, particularly in Milan, where a Romantic periodical, Il Conciliatore (1818-19; "The Peacemaker"), was published. Giovanni Berchet (patriotic poet whose Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo [1816; "Half-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son"] is an important manifesto of Italian popular romanticism), Silvio Pellico, Ludovico di Breme, Giovita Scalvini, and Ermes Visconti were among its contributors. Their efforts were silenced in 1820 when several of them were arrested by the Austrian police because of their liberal opinions; among them was Pellico, who later wrote a famous account of his experiences, Le mie prigioni (1832; ).

Alessandro Manzoni (grandson of reformer Cesare Beccaria) was the chief exponent of Italian Romanticism, but perhaps an even higher claim to fame was his contribution to the resolution of the language problem. In 1821 he started working on a panoramic novel about the lives of simple people placed against a background of major historical events, and, in order that this should be accessible to a wide readership, he decided to write it in an idiom as close as possible to modern educated Florentine speech. This was a formidable enterprise for someone whose first languages were French and Milanese dialect-and to whom spoken Florentine was virtually a foreign tongue-and for the first draft (completed in 1823) he had to resort to Francesco Cherubini's Italian-Milanese dictionary. The second draft was published in 1825-27 under the title I promessi sposi (The Betrothed); and the final definitive edition came out in 1840-42 after a long, painstaking process of revision aimed at making the text conform more closely with colloquial Florentine usage. The result of this effort was clear, expressive prose-neither pretentious nor provincial-and the way in which the novel caught the public's imagination attested to Manzoni's success in addressing the sort of people to whom conventional literary Italian was almost as remote as Latin. Ironically, Manzoni the innovator became, in his turn, the model for a new kind of purism, with "Manzonians" composing works in an affected Tuscan, and it required authors with fresh ideas-not poor imitators-to continue the task of disencumbering and modernizing written Italian.

Manzoni's genius as a poet showed in the odes Il cinque maggio (1821; "The Fifth of May"), written on the death of Napoleon, and (1821; "March 1821") and in passages of his Inni sacri (1812-22; Sacred Hymns), five poems in celebration of church holy days, describing human affections. His tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola (performed 1820; "The Count of Carmagnola") and (1822), about the Frankish conquest of Italy, marked a victory of Romanticism over classicism; they contained passages of great lyrical beauty but lacked strong dramatic power.

The foremost Italian poet of the age was Giacomo Leopardi, an outstanding scholar and thinker whose philological works together with his philosophical writings, Operette morali, would alone place him among the great writers of the 19th century. Embittered by solitude, sickness, and near penury, he realized from age 20 the vanity of hope. Though he developed a doctrine of universal pessimism, seeing life as evil and death as the only comfort, the poetry based on these bitter, despairing premises was far from depressing. Most of Leopardi's poems were contained in one book, I canti ("Songs"; Eng. trans. The Poems of Leopardi), first published in 1831. Some were patriotic and were once very popular; but the most memorable came from deeper lyrical inspiration. Among them were "L'infinito," a meditation on infinity; "A Silvia," on the memory of a girl who died when he was 20; Le ricordanze, an evocation of his childhood; "Il passero solitario," comparing the lonely poet with the bird that sings in isolation; and "La quiete dopo la tempesta" and "Il sabato del villaggio," two pictures of village life. They balance depth of meaning and formal beauty, simplicity of diction, intensity, and verbal music.

Circumstances made it inevitable that Italian Romanticism should become heavily involved with the patriotic myths of the Risorgimento; yet, while this served a useful civic purpose at the time, it did not encourage literature of consistent artistic merit or enduring readability. Of the writings produced by figures associated in some way with Italy's struggle for nationhood, it tends to be the less typical ones that attract attention today: the dialect poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli describing the life of contemporary papal Rome; compositions by Giuseppe Giusti satirizing petty tyrants, political turncoats, and coarse parvenus; or the works of the republican Roman Catholic from Dalmatia, Niccolò Tommaseo. The undoubted masterpiece of Risorgimento narrative literature is Ippolito Nievo's Confessioni di un italiano (published posthumously in 1867; "Confessions of an Italian"; Eng. trans. The Castle of Fratta), which marks Nievo as the most important novelist to emerge in the interval between Manzoni and Giovanni Verga. Giuseppe Mazzini's letters can still be studied with profit, as can the memoirs of Luigi Settembrini ( Ricordanze della mia vita [1879-80; "Recollections of My Life"]) and Massimo D'Azeglio ( I miei ricordi [1868; Things I Remember]). D'Azeglio's historical novels and those of Francesco Guerrazzi now have a rather limited interest; and Mazzini's didactic writings-of great merit in their good intentions-are generally regarded as unduly oratorical. Giovanni Prati and Aleardo Aleardi, protagonists of the "Second Romanticism," wrote poetry of a sentimentality that helped to provoke a variety of reactive movements, including scapigliatura and .

Giosuè Carducci was an outstanding figure whose enthusiastic support for the national cause during the struggle of 1859-61 was changed to disillusionment by the difficulties in which the new kingdom was involved. The bitterness of some of his poetry revealed frustration and rebelliousness. Rime nuove (The New Lyrics) and Odi barbare (The Barbarian Odes), both of which appeared in the 1880s, contained the best of his poetry: memories of childhood, evocations of landscape, laments for domestic sorrows, an inspired representation of historical events, an ambitious effort to resuscitate the glory of Roman history, and an anachronistic but sincere cult of pagan civilization. He tried to adapt Latin prosody to Italian verse, which sometimes produced good poems, but his opposition to Romanticism and his rhetorical tirades provoked a strong reaction, and his metrical reform was short-lived. He was also a scholarly historian of literature, and his literary essays had permanent value, although philosophical criticism such as that of Francesco De Sanctis was uncongenial to him. Both his poetry and his criticism were cited when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1906.

De Sanctis himself was connected politically with the Risorgimento, but he is remembered chiefly for his critical writings. His most important works were various critical essays and Storia della letteratura italiana (1870-71; History of Italian Literature). His main tenet was that literature was to be judged not on its intellectual or moralistic content so much as by the spirit of its "form," and the role of the critic was to discover how this form had been unconsciously and spontaneously conceived by studying its creator's temperament and background and the age in which he lived. De Sanctis was not properly appreciated in his day but came into his own at the turn of the century when Benedetto Croce rescued his works from oblivion.

While Carducci was still alive, Giovanni Pascoli acquired a reputation and succeeded him in the chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna. His art was often impressionistic and fragmentary, his language occasionally laborious, but his lyricism, at first timid in inspiration in (1891; "Tamarisks"), rose to fuller tones when he attempted the loftier themes of antiquity: Roman heritage and greater Italy. His original vein still found expression in Canti di Castelvecchio (1903; "Songs of Castelvecchio") and in the classicism of Poemi conviviali (1904; "Convivial Poems"). Later he produced-both in humanistic Latin and in self-consciously elaborate Italian-heroic hymns in honour of two sacred cities, Rome and Turin.

The veristi and other narrative writers

The patriotic niceties and sentimental Romanticism of much Risorgimento writing inevitably provoked a reaction. The first serious opposition came from the scapigliati (literally, "disheveled," or "bohemians"), adherents of an antibourgeois literary and artistic movement that flourished in the northern metropolises of Milan and Turin during the last four decades of the 19th century and whose declared aim was to link up with the most advanced Romantic currents from abroad. Unfortunately the movement-perhaps by its very nature-lacked intellectual cohesion and tended to cultivate the eccentric as an end in itself. The scapigliati, however, made a useful contribution in social criticism and in their informal linguistic approach. Among the foremost scapigliati were Giuseppe Rovani, whose monumental novel about Milanese life, I cento anni ( The Hundred Years), was issued in installments (1856-58 and 1864-65); Emilio Praga, a poet tormented by contradictions; and Arrigo Boito, poet, musician, and librettist for Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello.

A more lasting and fruitful successor to conventional Italian Romanticism was ("realism"; first theoretically expounded by Luigi Capuana in 1872), a movement initially inspired by the French Naturalist writers and influenced by positivist and determinist ideas. The veristi were not concerned with sermons or noble sentiments but with observable phenomena. When they dealt with the Italy of the Risorgimento, they showed it warts and all. The greatest of verismo narrators was without a doubt Giovanni Verga, who explained in a preamble to a short story, "L'amante di Gramigna" (1880; Eng. trans. "Gramigna's Lover"), that in a perfect novel the sincerity of its reality would be so evident that the hand of the artist would be absolutely invisible and the work of art would seem to have matured spontaneously without any point of contact with its author. At times Verga almost seems to have achieved this unattainable goal, and in his two great narrative works dealing with the victims of social and economic change, I Malavoglia (1881; "The Malavoglia Family"; Eng. trans. The House by the Medlar Tree) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), the reader often has the sensation of being put down in an unfamiliar milieu and-as would happen in real life-left to pick up the threads from gossip and chance remarks. Another verista, Federico De Roberto, in his novel I vicerè (1894; The Viceroys), has given a cynical and wryly funny account of an aristocratic Sicilian family that adapted all too well to change. Capuana, the founder of verismo and most rigorous adherent to its impersonal method of narration, is known principally for his dramatic psychological study, Il marchese di Roccaverdina (1901; "The Marquis of Roccaverdina").

In their search for documentary exactitude the veristi paid close attention to regional background. For Verga, De Roberto, and Capuana, this was Sicily. Matilde Serao, on the other hand, has given a detailed and colourful reportage of the Neapolitan scene, while Renato Fucini conveyed the atmosphere of traditional Tuscany. Emilio De Marchi, another writer in the realist mold, has Milan for his setting and in Demetrio Pianelli (1890) has painted a candid but essentially kindly portrait of the new Milanese urban middle class. Antonio Fogazzaro was akin to the veristi in his powers of observation and in his descriptions of minor characters; but he was strongly influenced by Manzoni, and his best narrative work, Piccolo mondo antico (1895; The Little World of the Past), is a nostalgic look back to a supposedly less individualistic age when inner tranquillity was seemingly achieved by devotion to a shared ideal. The veristi had a leavening effect on Italian literature generally, and their influence can be discerned, for example, in the early novels of the Sardinian Grazia Deledda (awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926) and to some extent in the narrative works of the Sienese writer Federigo Tozzi, including Con gli occhi chiusi (1919; "With Closed Eyes") and Tre croci (1920; Three Crosses). Tozzi, however, belongs psychologically and stylistically to the 20th century.

Giovanni Carsaniga Anthony Oldcorn

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Italian literature - 17th-century literature

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Italian literature - 17th-century literature: The 17th century in Italian literature was traditionally described as a period of "decadence" in which writers who were devoid of sentiment resorted to exaggeration and tried to cloak the poverty of their subject matter beneath an exuberance of form.

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