“Là ‘Ve il Vocabol suo Diventa Vano / Arriva’ Io Forato nella Gola” : Riprese e Rielaborazioni Dantesche nella Poesia di Mario Luzi

Abstract

The poet Mario Luzi (1914-2005) was faced with Dante’s poetry from the beginning of his literary activity, so that over time his verses have taken on the character of a modern Dantesque journey, full of uncertainties, doubts and pitfalls. Luzi was deeply impressed by the poetic mens of Dante, that managed to hold together multiple human experiences, as well as by the “unity of the idea”: a unit that was also faith, theology, and an idea which divides itself into several characters, into an I that, even though it materializes in so many persons, always remains itself. Through some intertextual examples, this study seeks to show how the return to the Commedia and the reworking of its verses demonstrate the consistent presence of Dante’s work in Luzi’s poetic collections, sometimes explicitly and sometimes covertly hidden. For Luzi, the reference is the lyric of Purgatory, the one where time exists, and so the one that represents the human condition, which is an experience of pain and of possible compensation, lived in corpore vivi. The concept of ‘in progress’, ‘in action’, which corresponds to his perception of the Commedia, also corresponds to his feeling and poetics, to the point that it becomes the text to recall permanently, especially in turning points of his writing