Among Fanciulli

This chapter reads Giovanni Pascoli’s boarding school idyll Paedagogium, a poem written in Latin in 1903, alongside his educational writings, including the essay “Pensieri scolastici,” made famous by Giorgio Agamben. In his reading of the essay Agamben abstracts the fanciullino, the small child privileged in Pascoli’s poetics, from the contexts in which the poet wrote and taught, making this child into the bearer of a “voice” prior to any and every particular instance of human speech. This reading has the advantage of drawing our attention to Pascoli’s striking claim that “the language of poetry is always a dead language.” The chapter contends, however, that Agamben obscures the things that Pascoli’s poetry does with “dead language.” The chapter returns Pascoli’s “Pensieri scolastici” to the context of its first publication: a journal for schoolteachers in which Pascoli warned of threats to the old school, but also to poetry and thought as such. Against such threats, and opposing Giovanni Gentile’s pedagogical philosophy, Paedagogium calls for the preservation of the past in its difference from the present and of the dead language in its difference from the living. Pascoli thus turns out not to celebrate, but rather to take instructive distance from, the nation.