Pascoli e la prima persona dell’imperfetto

In his historical development the first person of the Italian past imperfect tense had an analogical ending -o beside the etymological -a. In the late nineteenth century, both issues were accepted in poetry. The paper proposes a criterion for the choice of -o and -a in the poems of Giovanni Pascoli. On the base of his definitive texts as well of manuscript variants, we can assume that Pascoli uses the ending -a only with the expressed pronoun io and considers -o (usually without io) as a less literary option. The corrections were usually made before the first print and stimulated the poet to attempt echoing effects (for instance in the poem Il bolide).