FOREWORD
Robert Caruso was born on 13 March 1965 in Cosenza, Southern Italy, where he lived until the age of 18. In 1983 he graduated from the Liceo Classico "B. Telesio" (grammar high school) and then enrolled at the faculty of Letters and Philosophy at "La Sapienza" university in Rome, where he lived for about two years. In '84, RAI (Italian state television) broadcast the film "Primi Amori" by film director Domenico Rafele (who had previously worked as Bertolucci's assistant director), in which Robert played a role based on his Rob Leer 'persona', which was the pseudonym he used as singer-guitarist-songwriter in the 1980s - first as frontman of the Rob Leer Band, then of the Electric Kids - when he pursued a music career which made him famous in the underground rock scene, and which ultimately, in 1985, brought him to London, where he has been living ever since.
After a solo career in the first half of the 1990s, using his own name, - in which his previous urban rock music met the Mississippi Delta Blues tradition and influences from West African to Indian music, and during which he released three albums for independent record labels and toured across Europe for a few years - Robert abandoned the music scene to concentrate on writing poetry, eventually obtaining a BA in Philosophy and English Literary Studies at Middlesex University, North London.
Brought up on Greek and Latin literature, from Homer to Virgil, and Italian classics from Dante and Petrarch to Foscolo and Leopardi, Caruso's own poetry can be seen in a sense as an updated version of some themes found in Romanticism and Decadentism, in the works of poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud in particular, but in a contemporary and personal style, and an original mode of vision. He has also translated English literature into Italian and vice versa, and in this field his major contribution is his anthology of translations of the poets and writers of the Scapigliatura (1860-1880 circa), who have never been translated into English previously. The Scapigliati were an avant-garde movement who had an immediate impact on the course of Italian culture, influencing the fields of literature, painting and music. Robert has translated the main authors of this bohemian movement, such as Emilio Praga, Igino Ugo Tarchetti (whose long underrated works have had a significant revival in the USA in recent years) Arrigo Boito (chiefly known as librettist of Verdi's operas), Giovanni Camerana and Carlo Dossi.
Caruso's many years spent in England have left their mark on his poetry, which has evolved from rhymed poems through free verse to prose poems. "Transcendence" collects his earliest poetic efforts ( some of which have been published in literary magazines), which are characterized by a metropolitan, almost gothic vision of London. His poems are imbued with street realism, metaphysical concerns, an anarcoid point of view and a personal kind of mysticism. In the form and content of "Transcendence" his many influences can at times be clearly detected the already mentioned Dante, Leopardi, Foscolo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Praga and Tarchetti, but also the English Romantics (Byron, Shelley, Blake) and the German ones (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Heine) and American authors such as Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, all the way to Burroughs and Kerouac. His interest in the diverse philosophies of Stoicism, Neo-platonism, German Idealism, Transcendentalism and the visionary works of Swedenborg is also evident from his writing. At present Caruso is working on a collection of love poems, the "Sublimations", in which the basic sensual impulse is sublimated into a spiritual and visionary type of love. He is also studying at UCL, London, for an MA in Italian studies.
Despite his on-going attachment to the classics, Robert Caruso's poetry is extremely sensitive to our present 'Zeitgeist', and his character of Anglo-Italian poet, to whom art and life are one and the same thing, makes the reading of his heartfelt poetry a fascinating and rewarding experience.
Christian Rosenkrautz, London, 2003.
