Dino Campana

Dino Campana (born August 20, 1885, Marradi, Italy—died March 1, 1932, Scandicci) was an innovative Italian lyric poet who is almost as well known for his tragic, flamboyant personality as for his controversial writings. His collection Canti orfici (1914; Orphic Songs) is an important work of 20th-century Italian literature and especially influenced modern Italian poetry.

Campana began to show signs of mental instability and exhibit erratic behavior in his early teens. He studied chemistry intermittently at the University of Bologna but failed to graduate. Thereafter he began a wandering life, traveling throughout Europe and Latin America. He held a variety of jobs, including musician, fireman, policeman, and fair vendor, and sometimes was imprisoned briefly or committed to psychiatric hospitals for extended periods. His only poetry is contained in the emotionally intense collection Canti orfici. A strain of nihilism persists through the conflicting attitudes of his fragmentary poems. They alternate erratically between hallucination and reality, love and fear, Christian and pagan beliefs, at times achieving stunning clarity of expression. His Lettere (1958; “Letters”), written in 1916–18, reveal his decline into insanity and melancholia. In January 1918 he was institutionalized in a hospital in Scandicci (near Florence), where he lived for the rest of his life.