Jesuit poets
Professors, theologians, spiritual leaders but also poets. Not everyone knows, in fact, that several Jesuits wrote poetry, in addition to devoting themselves to their apostolate.
Rhymes and sonnets
Most of them did so only for pleasure, without ever putting into print the product of their ingenuity, which now are in their respective files and folders in our historical archives.
Some put their talents at the service of practical needs, as in the case of Fr. Angelini, who was particularly skilled in composing epitaphs and inscriptions to commemorate historical episodes or the lives of certain individuals.
With the exception of a few scattered examples, such as the case of Fr Bigazzi and his composition ‘Il mio penare è una chiavina d’oro’ (My penance is a golden key), these poems are often unknown, waiting for their authors to be studied. As in the case of some poems found in the personal file of Fr. Carlo Grossi, a member of the Province of Turin who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this case, the Jesuit brothers and students dedicated verses to him on certain occasions: for his name day and recovery from an illness.
Sometimes this dowry was unknown to the confreres and only became known with the death of the Jesuit and the reorganisation of his papers.
How many Jesuit ‘poets’ are there?
It is difficult to answer this question. Consulting the inventories, we find poems for about seven Jesuits in the Venetian-Milanese Province, as many as fourteen in the Turin Province, two in the Roman Province, one in the Neapolitan Province, four in the Province of Italy. Twenty-eight poets. However, these are not exhaustive numbers. In fact, the poems are not only in personal files, but also in the funds of personal writings that still need to be reordered. From a few spot checks, carried out for our researchers, we have already seen that there are poems and poems in these folders as well, so the number of Jesuit poets is certainly bound to rise.
Moreover, we cannot state with certainty that there were only a little less than thirty Jesuits devoted to poetry. We have to consider the ways in which the papers of the deceased Jesuits reached the archive.
In the past, when a Jesuit died, the superior checked the papers in the deceased’s room. Sometimes he delegated this task to the minister. Often non-objective criteria were applied in choosing which documents to save and which to discard, such as the ‘fame’ of a Jesuit. Those who suffered most from this were the figure of the brother, but also the personalities of less prominent Jesuits of whom not much is preserved.
Poems from the time of the novitiate
We can distinguish between two types of compositions: those written for pleasure at different times in one’s life and those dating back to the early years of the novitiate. In fact, novices often tried their hand at composing sonnets or structures that are more complex for Latin, Greek and rhetoric lessons.
It is common to find some of these among the papers in the novitiates, where there are notebooks and manuscripts containing poems or prose texts written by the novices themselves. They could be submitted for evaluation by their teachers or read and recited during annual academics.
These are exercises, so they are not the result of genuine inspiration, but they can certainly already provide a glimpse of the talent of some Jesuits from their novitiate years.
Not just poetry
Other works of genius than poetry can also be found among the Jesuit papers. We often find drawings and sketches of Jesuits skilled in drawing or sheet music, for those who knew music.
Sometimes Jesuits received compositions, acrostics, drawings, sheet music as gifts from brothers, relatives and the faithful.
