Life & Wisdom Quote by Grazia Deledda

A modest sentence that quietly asserts a whole second body of work. Deledda doesn’t announce “lost poems” with romantic flair; she files them like unarchived documents: “some poems,” “not been collected,” “in a volume.” The effect is deliberate understatement, the kind that reads as practical but carries a low thrum of biography and power.

The intent is partly bibliographic, but the subtext is about visibility and control. To say poems haven’t been “collected” isn’t the same as saying they don’t exist or don’t matter. It suggests work scattered across periodicals, private manuscripts, or the informal circuits where women writers often had to operate. “A volume” is the credential: the object that makes writing official, reviewable, ownable. Deledda’s phrasing hints at the gatekeeping of literary institutions and publishers, and at the way a career can be defined by what gets bound and sold rather than what gets written.

Context sharpens the line. Deledda, a Sardinian author who became a Nobel laureate, built her reputation largely as a novelist in a period that prized certain genres as “serious” and others as disposable or domestic. Poetry here becomes the uncapitalized labor of a public artist: another register of voice, potentially more intimate, left outside the curated self. The sentence also anticipates posterity. It’s a soft signal to future editors and scholars: there is more to find, more to assemble, more Deledda than the shelf allows.