Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) strolled into prominence (in Montale's admiring phrase) 'in a friendly way, with his hands in his pockets'. For his contemporaries this apparent insouciance made a refreshing change from Carducci's habitual seriousness and d'Annunzio's insistent sensuality.

Gozzano's usual subject matter is the banal domestic life of northern Italy in the first two decades of our century, treated with a recurrent nostalgia for its fairly recent past, and a strong if half-contemptuous affection for the bourgeois paraphernalia, the 'good things in the worst taste', which still cluttered drawingrooms or bad already found their way into attics. Still little known in England, this poetry, deliberately low-key and conversational, has an irony reminiscent of Laforgue's and a questioning uncertainty which make it a landmark of modernism in Italy.

J. G. Nichols is currently completing a volume of Gozzano 's poems and letters.