Tra le ombre della poesia: La scrittura poetica e alcune concezioni di “buio”, “oscurità” e “ombra”

• Autor(a) principal: Angelini, Cosimo
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: ita
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• DOI: 10.51427/com.est.2022.0001
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.51427/com.est.2022.0001
• topic: Italian poetry; darkness; obscurity; shadow; twentieth century; poesia italiana; buio; oscurità; ombra; XX secolo; poesia italiana; buio; oscurità; ombra; XX secolo

We propose an overview of the presence and functions of darkness, obscurity, and shadow in Italian poetry, privileging the twentieth-century line but with some references both to the pre-twentieth-century tradition, from Dante to Pascoli, and to contemporary poetry. This overview is neither chronological nor exhaustive: we will limit ourselves to highlighting some particular uses of these terms and some constants, preferring those cases in which the metaphorical use of darkness, night, or shadow makes them not merely a scenic background but the protagonists of the poetic action. The introduction provides a framework for the lexical problem of the chosen terms, and then attempts to offer some critical ideas useful for a thematic study of the chosen corpus. The first part of the study focuses on the positive connotation of the terms taken into consideration, discovering links between poets who are also very different. The aspect of writing at night is the one that united most poetic compositions: darkness was frequently represented as a refuge, a happy moment for poetic writing, as opposed to the chaotic day. In the second part, however, starting from Dante of «selva oscura», poems were proposed in which darkness, shadow, and obscurity are synonymous with sin, oblivion, and death. In this section, variants prevail, because the negative conceptions found are difficult to group in motifs or thematic areas, except for the common negative valence. The ultimate purposes of this article are to highlight the recurring constants and particular variations in the use of darkness, obscurity, and shadow in Italian poetry, from the twentieth century to the present.