LA POESIA-VITA DI DARIA MENICANTI La vita dello scriba è una «manciata di sillabe e vocali e consonanti e di allitterazioni»

Abstract

Poetry - Daria Menicanti’s life. Scribal existence is an «handful of syllables and vowels and consonants and allitterations». This speech means to shed light on a poetic female voice of the XXth century, which has been unfairly forgotten: Daria Menicanti. Pupil of one of the leading figures of the italian critical rationalism, whose name is Antonio Banfi, Menicanti moulded herself at a school called “Statale di Milano” and took part in the cultural and intellectual circle known as the “scuola di Milano”, gravitating toward Banfi’s antidogmatic philosophical thought. Her affinity to this passionate and stimulating cultural environment (whose followers were not only philosophers, but also pedagogists, musicologists, artists, intellectuals, writers and poets), let Menicanti acquire Banfi’s complex lesson and inspired her to transfer his philosophy in most of her poetic works. Poetry always needs to start from magmatic reality, crossing infinite plans, from the chaos of existence where everybody lives. However joys, passions, fears represent only a starting point: as a matter of fact, the poet appoints to eulogise reality in order to transform it through the clarification afforded by reasoning, poetically inflected as a lyrical and philosophical summery, as labor limae, a meticulous work on shape and word, which is - first of all - sound and music. According to Daria Menicanti, by weakening her own past experiences, poetry could reach its goal: adding value in terms of universality, not only from an aestethic point of view, but also from ethical and moral ones.