MORE from Jean Mudge: article
Lauro de Bosis in Rome, 1930, age 29
LAURO DE BOSIS BETWEEN ITALY AND AMERICA, 1924–1930: The Making of
An Anti-Fascist Mind”
—The Italian American Review,
7 (Winter 2000), No. 2, 77-98.
SUMMARY: For one who in 1931 so strongly felt that to conquer Fascism one must risk one’s life, nine years earlier at the start of Mussolini’s regime, the young poet Lauro de Bosis would have seemed an unlikely candidate for such a sacrifice. This essay attempts to track de Bosis’s metamorphosis from an apparently apolitical youth to that of a convinced anti-Fascist. His experiences in America made him ever tougher and more realistic. By 1925, he was opposing the dramatic change toward totalitarianism facing Italy. Soon, this mission took priority over a poetic calling.