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.