Ecolirica e “umanesimo ambientale” nell’opera tarda di Andrea Zanzotto

Abstract

The article focuses on the denunciation of the environmental catastrophe as the central hub of the late works of Andrea Zanzotto, from Haiku. For A Season, composed during the first half of the 1980s, to his latest book, Conglomerati (2009). Starting from the poet’s awareness of writing from within an unprecedented environmental crisis, the analysis aims to highlight the “ecological potential” of his poetry, the novelties it presents, after Idioma, moving ever more dramatically and paradoxically between the utopiaof the garden, as a symbol of harmony, and the infernal one of the forest, to indicate the degeneration of human action and its nefarious effects on the entire planet. Thus emerges the ability of this poet to transform his texts into pedagogical “planetary gardens”, in which to cultivate resistance strategies that are given within the same ecosystem. In conclusion, the article aims to underline how, in its late phase, Zanzotto’s poetry presents itself in the form of an “environmental humanism” that involves every living form and raises the need for a different way of inhabiting the earth in the times of the Anthropocene.