Dal 1914 a Thomas Kling. Considerazioni sulla poesia di guerra

In an attempt to offer a new approach to the understanding of war poetry, the first part of this essay focuses on the reasons for the literary genre of poetry being successful immediately prior to and during the First World War in comparison with other forms. In the second part, the aesthetical relationship between poetry and war is shown using examples of European poetry from the Twentieth Century. This essay examines the traditional definition of “war poetry” or “poetry of war”, and prompts an interpretation of war poems that is not strictly chronological in nature, being representations of the complex relationship between culture, conflict and memory. A particular conception of history through poetry is sustained by the contemporary German poet Thomas Kling, who published a series about the Great War entitled “Der Erste Weltkrieg” in 1999. The subject of the last part of this essay entails his archaeological approach to the language and his poetical summary of history by means a dynamic memory process that occurs in the present day.