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Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)



Pier Paolo Pasolini Reads, recorded 1962

  1. Il canto popolare
  2. Le ceneri di Gramsci
  3. La terra di lavoro
  4. La Guinea

Pasolini was what can be termed a citizen-poet. He was concerned with his homeland and expressed his feelings in his work. Patriotic poetry usually comes out of a right-wing tradition and is nationalistic, but Pasolini's great originality was to be a citizen-poet of the left... He wept over the ruins of Italy but without a hint of rhetoric. He was a modern who used the classical tradition. Rimbaud, the poet of the Paris Commune, the most revolutionary of poets, remained his greatest influence. In the years after the Mussolini dictatorship, he adhered, like many of his compatriots, to an unorthodox brand of communism, that was both Christian and utopian, and these feelings for the poor and underprivileged motivated his own poetry and films.


RELATED RESOURCES:
Pier Paolo Pasolini in UbuWeb Film