Narrativity and poetry in the composition of Cesare Pavese’s poem

Abstract

This essay has two goals: a general one, the study of post-symbolist poetical traces and a particular one, the place of the poetical attempt of Pavese to overcome the difficulty of writing poetry, avoiding the Symbolist inherintance and escaping a simple narrative poetry. Pavese builds a poem set up in the quasi inmovility, composed by elements coming from the narrative world, using a sort of photographic fixation, a a-temporal present. The pavesian poem would be in reference to the pure narrative what the photography is to the motion picture. The author reach in this way a kind of ‘pure’ poetry, free both from narrativity and discursive argumentation.