note by Ungaretti

In his prefatory note to all editions of L'allegria from 1931 on, my birthdate brother (and James Dean's!), Giuseppe Ungaretti writes:

if some progress has been made as an artist, he [the poet, Ungaretti] hopes it also indicates some perfection reached as a man. He came to maturity as a man in the midst of extraordinary events [i.e. the War], to which he was never a stranger. Without ever denying the universal necessities of poetry, he has always thought that, for the universal to be imagined, it must harmonize with the unique voice of the poet by means of an active feeling for history.