Abstract

The essay examines the different ways Luciano Erba uses irony, considered as a form of the thought, in his works. Over the time, the poet turns to irony more clearly and openly, viewing it as a means - or even the only possible one - to find an answer to the endless quest for a meaning, which becomes increasingly strong in his poems. Erba's Socratic questioning and dissembling is refined in the light of the elements of "kenosis" of the Evangelical language and leads the poet somewhere close to the truth, after his dangerous travel through the nothingness.