Carlo Bo

Carlo Bo (25 January 1911 – 21 July 2001) was a poet, literary critic, a professor and Life senator of Italy (from 1984). Before the Second World War, in the year 1936, he published an essay on the literary magazine Frontespizio which was gathering together the most relevant poets like Mario Luzi, and contemporary artists from Ottone Rosai to Giorgio Morandi and Quinto Martini. His essay was titled "Letteratura come vita (Literature as a way of life)", containing the theoretical-methodological fundamentals of hermetic poetry. This was to become a strong poetical movement comprising important poets, such as Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale, both of whom would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1959, 1975). Bo himself, however, never did and, at the age of 86, was rendered incapable of understanding Dario Fo's 1997 receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, saying "I must be too old to understand. What does this mean? That everything changes, even literature has changed. Bo was president of University of Urbino from 1947, for more than 50 years.