6 h 56 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when love asks for more than conscience can allow?
In Antonio Fogazzaro’s The Mystery of the Poet, love meets obstacles, and a poet’s deepest feelings remain difficult for others to read. This romantic novel turns toward the private life beneath the surface: longing, devotion, and the uneasy space between what a person feels and what duty demands.
Fogazzaro writes in a world where faith, feeling, and duty press against one another. The stakes are intimate: how can love find room when conscience sets limits? Rather than hurry toward answers, the novel offers a slow, thoughtful encounter with quiet feeling and moral questions that resist easy judgment.
What you’ll discover
- A heart not easily read Follow a poet whose inner life remains elusive to the people around him.
- Love held at a distance Enter a romance where obstacles give longing and devotion their particular weight.
- The pull of conscience Consider how the claims of duty can trouble even the strongest private feelings.
- Room for quiet feeling Settle into a slower pace that gives thought and emotion space to unfold.
- Faith beside desire Explore Fogazzaro’s concern with how belief and romantic feeling can live together.
Who will love it
Readers who love romance with a spiritual heart, letters and notebooks, and poets and their muses will find a warm, confiding voice and travel through Italian lakes, old German towns and the Rhine.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A secret written down for a friend
- A voice in the storm at Belvedere
- Miss Yves, Leopardi and a plea not to follow
- Letters across the mountains
- Nuremberg by moonlight and a meeting
- May wine and a small German town
- Three honest men and a promise tested
- The Rhine, Heidelberg and a shadow
- How the story is told and what it holds
Who’s who
- The poetAn unnamed Italian writer and the narrator, who follows a voice from his dreams and tries to write his secret down for one friend.
- Violet YvesA fair, sharp-witted young woman of English and Italian parents, lame in one leg, who guards a wounded heart and a promise of marriage.
- Dr. Stephan ToplerA fiery, kind Swabian scholar who plays old Italian music, scolds the world, and loves his brother like a father.
- Professor Hans ToplerThe shy, honest schoolteacher from Eichstätt who is engaged to Violet and wants only to make her safe and content.
- Luise von DobraA lively blonde girl in Eichstätt who loves Violet dearly and quietly decides to help her friend find happiness.
- Paul and Emma SteeleA warm, merry couple of Rüdesheim who take Violet in and help the lovers on the Rhine.
- Mrs. TreubergLuise's aunt and Violet's friend, a talkative, kind woman who warns the poet about Violet's stern uncles in Nuremberg.
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- Audiobook
- 6 h 56 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 7 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Il mistero del poeta in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Il mistero del poeta
by Antonio Fogazzaro · 1888
A poet in a mountain hotel above Lake Lugano hears the voice from his dream, and follows its owner into Germany.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Imagine a voice you have heard only in dreams, and then hearing it in the dark. Fogazzaro's The Mystery of the Poet is a love story set down as a private manuscript, written in 1881 for one faithful friend.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A secret written down for a friend
The book opens with a frame. Fogazzaro writes that a lady has sent him a manuscript left by a dead writer, and she wants it printed as a novel with the hero unnamed. He agrees.
Then the poet speaks. On All Souls Day, 1881, he sits in a lonely villa with fog at the windows and decides to write the secret that is the life of his soul. He addresses one dear friend, and he asks her to tell the truth if lies are ever printed.
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What is The Mystery of the Poet about?
It follows an unnamed Italian poet who hears in a mountain hotel the voice he dreamed of twice. He loves a young woman named Violet Yves, follows her through Germany, and fights for the right to marry her.
Who is Violet Yves?
Violet Yves is a young woman born in Italy to an English father and an Italian mother. She is quick, ironic and gentle, walks with a slight limp, and has a painful past she shares with the poet.
Is The Mystery of the Poet a true story?
Fogazzaro presents it as a real manuscript left by a poet and sent to him by a lady, but it is a novel framed that way. Its first page carries his letter dated November 15, 1887.
The author
Antonio Fogazzaro
1842–1911 · Italian novelist
Antonio Fogazzaro was an Italian novelist and one of his country's most widely read authors at the turn of the twentieth century. The Saint (Il Santo), his controversial novel of a would-be reformer inside the Catholic Church, caused a sensation across Europe and was placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books. The novel once scandalized Rome.
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