The highest praise he can confer upon Italian matters, is to call them Greek Poetry.

'When I have to express my aims in verse, I compare myself to Columbus, who said that he would discover a new world or drown.' Again, in this self-revealing sentence, Chiabrera betrays the instinct which in common with his period he obeyed.

He was bound to startle society by a discovery or to drown.
For this, be it remembered, was the time in which Pallavicino, like Marino, declared that poetry must make men raise their eyebrows in astonishment.

For Chiabrera, educated as he had been, that new world toward which he navigated was a new Hellenic style of Italian poetry; and the Theban was to guide him toward its shores.

But on the voyage Chiabrera drowned: drowned for eternity in hyper-atlantic whirlpools of oblivion.