The evolution of poetry in Malta

Abstract

In a small island like Malta, where the older traditional Italian literature of the Maltese was the concern of a numerically restricted and socially privileged class, romanticism not only implied a radical reaction against a worn-out aesthetic vision but also motivated a hitherto unprecedented formation of national awareness. Such a national conscience had to be both political and linguistic.

The more liberal Maltese writers of the nineteenth century (all of whom had an exclusively Italian culture) were bound at a certain moment to understand that their own intellectual identity now demanded that they solve the Italian-Maltese dilemma in favour of the latter, since this dichotomy was partly the local version of the continental one (classicism - romanticism) Consequently they understood the need to write in Maltese according to the basic needs of the people. Since these needs were essentially political, the new literary movement was bound to uphold a patriotic vision of life and to translate the native idiom into a vehicle which was both pedagogically effective and aesthetically valid.