L'abisso dei poeti. La categoria di 'poesia abissale' come matrice identitaria della poesia contemporanea

This paper starts from some of the great insights that theoretically structure the dialogue between thinking and poetizing in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in order to propose, in the context of the Italian reception, the category of abyssal poetry and to envisage it as an identity matrix capable of thinking the variegated and stratified heterogeneity of contemporary poetry within a horizon of comprehensibility. By contemporary poetry, in fact, one must mean a horizon so wide that not even the most perceptive and inclusive historical-critical-philological-literary categories can contain it. For this reason, the application of ontological categories, which make us still find an inescapable point of reference in Heideggerian thought, can be particularly effective. Despite the fact that Heidegger does not always succeed in intercepting the multifaceted nature and the kaleidoscopic complexity of contemporary poetry and runs the risk of remaining anchored to an ‘ideal’ vision of the poet who, instead, has irretrievably lost his ‘halo’, it is precisely from the epochal definition that Heidegger, in the wake of Hölderlin, proposes of the poet as one who is ‘capable’ of expressing the hurling towards the abyss characterizing the mortals – who reach sooner into the abyss –, that we can start from in order to establish not only that the relationship with the abyss is one of the fundamental tasks of the contemporary poet, but also and above all that this relationship, while undergoing considerable modifications with reference to the uniqueness always inherent to the most different poetic voices, continues to remain in fact a fundamental task. In the light of this, we will proceed with a necessary reformulation of the dimension of the abyss in stark opposition to its ordinary meaning, and then move on to identify an equally fundamental shift, that from a topology of the abyss to a topology of the abysses by attempting to investigate this new relationship with the abyss that is established and that can be corresponded precisely by a poetry that is also abyssal. In view of this we intend to propose that this category allows Heidegger another of the most relevant passages of his analysis about poetic language and language : the passage from the essence of language to the language of essence, i.e. to the essence as language.