Lyrical Modes of the Aesthetic Protest at the Poets of the War Generation

Abstract

The lyrical protest of the poets from the war generation exhibits a wide range of complexity. In their programmatically expressed desire to depart from the literary tradition, from the poetical canon of the period, the rebel poets make use of an arsenal of techniques and procedures through which they denounce the literature of the moment. Their target is poetry in particular, which is accused of being fake and sterile, of betraying its original mission, as a rotten fruit of an aesthetics of the literariness, devoid of substance, and of a factitious vision, tributary to the tradition and to the patterns of the aesthetics of the time. In the complex range of the new aesthetic attitude, defiance, bohemian attitude and evasion are fundamental modes of the lyrical protest, developed by the representative poets of the war generation.

Keywords

• canon
• aesthetical protest
• the new poetry
• lyrical modes
• bohemian attitude
• evasion