I find greater difficulty in writing of recent Italian poetry than of fiction. In the first place, I have not read it so extensively, and, in the second, nearly every writer of fiction writes poetry as well. Some of the young poets are discussed in the chapter on Futurists in literature. Here I shall mention one or two others. Guido Gozzano, who recently died, in his twenty-eighth year, was a prolific writer of verse. It is confidently claimed by some critics that he earned the distinction of being called Italy's most representative poet, the only one since Pascoli and D'Annunzio who made a new vibration to the poetic lyre and stamped verse with an individual conception which poetasters have more or less accepted. But he suffered from hyperfecundity, and many of his intellectual children are anæmic and rachitic. Even though they are endowed with some feature of beauty their vitality is so slight that no one wants to adopt them, and their parent being busy with the creation of others, neglects them after having given them one passably decent suit of clothes in the shape of book-form publications, so they die. Guido Gozzano was a melancholy figure. From life he appeared to have got only sadness. At twenty-five years it had deluged his soul. His true infelicity was then of not being able even to be sad. Scarcely had he entered youth before he felt old. He had no companions, he was often ill; nothing appealed to him, not even poetry. Literary life resembled death. He forsook the city for the country, and the novelty of it for a while diverted him. But it was not for long. He vacillated between doing nothing and dreaming, between contemplating the emptiness of a grotesque reality and the nostalgia of an unreal life, felt but not seen. He was never emotional, never exalted, never blasphemous. Nevertheless, he would seem to have written incessantly. "Verso la Cuna del Mondo" ("Toward the Cradle of the World") consists of the impressions of a voyage in India made in 1912 and 1913. "I Colloqui" is a book of fables for children. In the "L'Altare del Passato" ("The Altars of the Past") Gozzano takes as a rhythm the cry for the things that were; the past arises anew in the intimacy of his feelings to tempt him and to inspire him. It is the generous wine that he hopes will intoxicate him and fill him with joy. Its effects are transitory. His last book, "L'Ultima Traccia" ("The Last Traces"), did not materially enhance his reputation as a story-teller. The story called "The Eyes of the Soul" is undoubtedly the best. A beautiful girl has to live her betrothed days alone; her fiancé goes to the war. She contracts smallpox, which disfigures her. When she is called to his bedside in the hospital where he is lying wounded, perhaps dying, she is concerned what his feelings will be when he sees her face. When she gets there he is not mortally injured, he is blind.