Emanuel Carnevali

Emanuel Carnevali, “The Black Poet” as William Carlos William once said, born in 1897, Florence, Italy. He immigrated to the U.S. just before World War I at the age of 16 and lived in the streets of New York where he held a series of menial jobs and learned the english language through the street advertising. He later moved to Chicago where he met and attended illustrious american poets like Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson.

When writing the novel The First God (il primo dio), he portrayed his life and relationship with the United States transforming America almost into a character.

In his poetry and prose, Carnevali prized immediacy of expression and vivid depictions of suffering. In 1919, Harriet Monroe invited Carnevali to become associate editor of Poetry, a position he held for six months. While in Chicago, he became seriously ill with encephalitis lethargica, a disease that caused him to shake uncontrollably. He was hospitalized and eventually returned to Italy, where he kept up correspondences with Williams and Boyle until his death in 1942 in a mental asylum.

Carnevali’s collections frequently include selections from his poetry, prose, and criticism. A Hurried Man (1925) was the only volume published during his lifetime; posthumous collections include The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali (1967), which was compiled and introduced by Kay Boyle, Fireflies (1970), and Furnished Rooms (2006).