Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between health and existential illness in the poetry of Mario Luzi. Luzi (1914-2005) was one of the most important poets of XX century Italian literature. For our author, poetry is a way to deepen the meaning of life and find a way to bear the turbulence and change of existence in faith. For this reason, Luzi opens his lyrics to illness and tries to find hope in three different ways. Time can be a remedy in the endless becoming of reality. Love connects humanity across generations with a transcendent dimension. In his poems of the eighties, Luzi also found illness in the language of terrorism and Italian politics of the time. Against this illness, our author, as God’s writer, tries to find a poetic word capable of expressing the beauty of nature