PERPETUATING ONESELF THROUGH WORDS. THE POETIC WORK OF LUIGI M. LOMBARDI SATRIANI

Abstract

This article deals with the figure of the professor, anthropologist, politician and intellectual Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani as a poet. To do so, we will focus on his second collection of poems, L’evasione dai giorni, which brings together thirty-seven poems from the first, Nostalgia di futuro, Poesia di Amori (1956-2013), which he completes with twenty-one more poems on time perceived as fleeting. Although these first books maintain a thematic line that extends to the third, Omnia vincit Amor. Poetica dell’Amore, it is the latter that has generated reflection on this vital facet of the author’s life. There is a small study that introduces the Spanish edition (Panero García, 2021) and two substantial and suggestive reviews (Castano, 2018; Puerto, 2023). Through poetry, our poet seeks true knowledge through art and beauty. And while these are at the service of human relations like the muses of Greek mythology, his way of conceiving knowledge and human relations governs the creative writing that brings his personal and intellectual affections closer and distances them. For a humanist like Lombardi Satriani, literature is necessary to break the phenomenological and empirical deadlock to which the social sciences often lead us. Words are the tool to overcome the time that consumes one’s own life and also that of loved ones.