He
Describes Himself As Wholly Disenchanted With The "Facile Fatuity" Of
Liberalism, The Fact Being, That He Lacked What A French Psychologist
Has Called The Function Of The Real; His Temperament Was Not Of The
Kind To Cope With Actualities.
This retirement is an epoch in his
life - it is the Grand Renunciation.
Henceforward he loses personal touch
with thinking humanity. At Macchia he remained, brooding on Albanian
wrongs, devising remedies, corresponding with foreigners and
writing - ever writing; consuming his patrimony in the cause of Albania,
till the direst poverty dogged his footsteps.
I have read some of his Italian works. They are curiously oracular, like
the whisperings of those fabled Dodonian oaks of his fatherland; they
heave with a darkly-virile mysticism. He shares Blake's ruggedness, his
torrential and confused utterance, his benevolence, his flashes of
luminous inspiration, his moral background. He resembles that visionary
in another aspect: he was a consistent and passionate adorer of the
Ewig-weibliche. Some of the female characters in his poems retain
their dewy freshness, their exquisite originality, even after passing
through the translator's crucible.
At the age of 19 he wrote a poem on "Odysseus," which was published
under a pseudonym. Then, three years later, there appeared a collection
of rhapsodies entitled "Milosao," which he had garnered from the lips of
Albanian village maidens. It is his best-known work, and has been
translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia
followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially
during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became
prodigious.
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