Abstract
This exploratory study, composed by five essays on the poetry of the sick body, offers the reader an excursus which chose to create a discourse that moves from mental illness more and more into corporeal and finally symbolic societal disease and decadence: from the condition of mental illness of Dino Campana and Alda Merini and the condition of hysteria associated with rebellious Sicilian poet Mariannina Coffa, to Primo Levi’s poetry as a means of trauma survival, and Elsa Morante’s obsession with body decadence and its symbolic celebration of the marginalised; finally with malady interpreted as symbolic of passive opposition to the bourgeois and its relevant ‘self-serving zeal and obtuse moralism’. These being all conditions which expressed through poetic images find a force to transform disability, marginality and inability to communicate into a locus of linguistic empowerment turning language into stories, and stories into denunciation and even revelation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Mosaici. Learned Online Journal of Italian Poetry |
| Volume | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - 26 Apr 2015 |
