There are two ways of approaching an estimate of D'Annunzio. One is to analyze him--to set him up as a god or a monster and to dissect him and study the elements of his complex mechanism, then put them together patiently and laboriously as one puts together a jigsaw picture-puzzle. It is the tempting way, but it risks injuring the sensibilities of his admirers and the judicially minded who are so constituted that they cannot pass judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts concerning him and his career: what he did and the circumstances attending the doing of them, that is, the environment in which they were done--both that which he created and that which was thrust upon him. Finally they want to view him in rest and in action. Then they are ready to render a verdict in much the same way as a jury renders a verdict with or without the analysis and summing up of the testimony and evidence by proponent or opponent advocate. The way of synthesis would be the way to approach an interpretation of D'Annunzio if the man were under discussion, but here only an estimate of his literary career is attempted. There is no dearth of evidence to show that he was a precocious child and a youth of prodigious intellectual acumen and prehensility, of boundless self-confidence and fathomless egocentrism. His first collection of verse, "Primo Vere" ("First Beginnings"), was published when he was fifteen years old, and two years later he published a second edition "corrected with pen and fire and augmented." From the beginning it was pointed out by critic and commentator that he plagiarized line and verse from poets of Italy, such as Giambattista Marino, Niccolo Tommaseo, and Giosuè Carducci, and of other countries; but if the accusations made any impression upon him it was not evident in his future conduct, for later he took from Verga and Capuana, from Nietzsche and Tolstoy, from Maeterlinck and Flaubert, from Ibsen and Dostoievsky, and from countless others that which it pleased him to take.