Yet, on the other hand, can one imagine Andrea and Elena, Giorgio and Ippolita arguing with our advanced thinkers of the moment: Is Monogamy Feasible?
or Can Men and Women be Friends?
D'Annunzio is not to be approached either in a mood of radical earnestness or of evangelical fervor.

He must be regarded as an artist of sensations, an Italian of the Renaissance set down in the middle of a drab century.

He began his life by a quest for perfect physical pleasure through all the senses, and inaugurated its last phase with a gesture of military courage which was not only a retort to those who, like Croce, had called him a dilettante, but an earnest of his conviction that he was a great artist of the lineage which bred men who were simultaneously great men of action.
Ernest Boyd..