typography expresses the modernist and mechanistic will of Soffici at play with the most sumptuous poetic counterpoint, will remain one of the most significant and vitally important works of our literature.
This poetry of Soffici, which seeks to bind with the invisible silk of an intense and nervous Pindarism the impressions which from all the universe converge to a brain as luminous and as fiery as a lens of Archimedes—this poetry did not come into being all at once. It had been prepared for slowly and gradually by Soffici himself and by others. But it is only in this book that Soffici reaches full self-consciousness and affirms himself in clear and definitive utterances which give him the right to be listened to, discussed, and recognized. Like all the true poets of this blasé and exacting age, Soffici demands and seeks the pure lyric, the lyric freed from anecdote, from narrative, from external motives, from eloquence, from description. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are the starting point, but the terminus is Soffici. No longer the proud and dolorous Parnassianism of the Fleurs du mal, no longer the psychological and fantastic mythology of the Saison en enfer. Here at last poetry is sound, color, form, word, a complex reflected image, an immense net of suggestions and reminiscences—freedom within an infinite wealth of forms and shadows. Soffici, with the sensitive
