Carlo Bo

Senator for life Carlo Bo
Senator for life
In office 18 July 1984 – 21 July 2001
Constituency	Appointed by Italian President of Republic
Personal details
Born	(1911-01-25)25 January 1911 Sestri Levante
Died	21 July 2001(2001-07-21) (aged 90) Genoa
Nationality	Italian
Occupation	poet
Profession	professor

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 Il Frontespizio which gathered 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). Carlo 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 the president of University of Urbino from 1947, for more than 50 years.

See also

• University of Urbino

References

• Obituary in The Independent