Renato Poggioli

Renato Poggioli (April 16, 1907 in Florence – May 3, 1963 in Crescent City), was an Italian academic specializing in comparative literature. After 1938, he lived in the United States. At the time of his death, he was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.Unsigned article, "Renato Poggioli Dies at 56, Noted Scholar and Author", ''Harvard Crimson'', May 6, 1963.
/ref> A prolific writer and translator, who was fluent in five languages, he is considered one of the founders of the academic discipline of comparative literature in the United States.

Early life

Poggioli was born in Florence, Italy, the son of a railroad administrator. In 1929 he received his doctorate in letters with a specialty in Slavic literature under the direction of Ettore Lo Gatto of the University of Florence. He also worked as a translator and critic. In 1931–32 he was an exchange professor at the University of Prague, returning to Prague in 1934 to lecture on Italian culture as a representative of the Italian government. He also lectured in this capacity in Vilnius and Warsaw in Poland. In 1935, he married Renata Nordio, a former classmate and student of Spanish literature at the University of Florence. He received a second doctorate in 1937 at the University of Rome.

Academic career and writings

In 1938 Poggioli, who wished to leave Italy, came to the United States with his wife to teach in a summer program at Middlebury College in Vermont. Virtually on his arrival in New England, he became involved in anti-Fascist initiatives that led in 1939 to the creation of the Mazzini Society, of which he also served as interim president. Members included Gaetano Salvemini (whose final lectures before his exile from Italy in 1925 Poggioli had heard as a student at the University of Florence); the former Italian foreign minister, Count Carlo Sforza; and Max Ascoli.

In the fall of 1938 Poggioli was hired as a visiting lecturer in Romance language and literatures at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, where he gave a course in Dante. The following year he became Assistant Professor of Italian Literature teaching graduate students at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with an interruption from 1943–45 when he served in the United States Army as a translator. The academic year 1946–47 saw his first stint, at the behest of Harry Levin, as visiting professor at Harvard. He also taught during the summer of 1947 at the University of Chicago.

Poggioli's most ambitious project during this period was his founding editorship, with Italian writer Luigi Berti who was based in Florence, of the Italian-language literary periodical ''Inventario'' (1946–1963) to which Poggioli contributed numerous articles and translations. The publication was intended to expose Italian readers, whose horizons had for years been narrowed by Mussolini's censorship, to a broad range of new developments in contemporary literature of all countries. It published literary and critical works by and about such important writers as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Boris Pasternak. Poggioli's own magnum opus, his ''Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia'', which traced the connection between the twentieth-century ''avant garde'' and the legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism, first appeared in ''Inventario'' in four installments between 1949 and 51.

In the fall of 1947, Harvard University, as part of its ongoing expansion of its department of Slavic studies, hired Poggioli and two year later, Roman Jakobson

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