Orphic Songs

Dino Campana wrote the unique, visionary masterwork of Italian literature Orphic Songs when he was in his twenties. The originality, rapturous language, and strange beauty of his poetry make him as important to twentieth-century poetry as García Lorca or Mayakovsky. Campana was the wild man of Italian poetry in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The war saved some young Italians from rebellion and from Fascism, but not Campana. Always an outsider, he was a vagabond who worked now and then as a gaucho, miner, fireman, organ-grinder, janitor, circus tumbler, horse groomer, and a wandering musician with a Gypsy band. He died in Castel Pulci, a psychiatric hospital, in 1932.

“Dino Campana’s small and intensely magical body of poetry from the early years of the last century–prose and free verse that combine the visual and the visionary with astonishing vigor and haunting grace–is little known to English-speaking readers.” —Oberlin College Press

Dino Campana (1885-1932) was an Italian lyricist and poet, known for his flamboyant personality. His only collection of poems is found in Orphic Songs. In 1918 he was admitted into a mental hospital and lived the rest of his life there.