Bertolt Brecht poeta: dalla poesia dell’eroe bastonato ai fotoepigrammi di guerra

The article aims at analyzing Brecht’s poetry from the first poems of the ‘beaten hero’ (Walter Benjamin) to the his last work about the second world war (Kriegsfibel) and at considering the intermediality as a crucial aspect of his works. The dialectic system of Brecht’s lyric, achieved through the insertion of extra-poetic material and the overlapping of words and images, of ‘classical’ texts and ‘modern’ medias, tends toward a historicization of his poetry and an actualization of the literary tradition of the past. In his early lyric works, dominated by anthropomorphic images of natural elements, such as trees, plants and water beings, Brecht seems to draw inspiration from the language of the new medias, by introducing many narrative and visual elements ad by choosing a basic, bare and paratactic speech. His last lyric work, Kriegsfibel, is indeed an assembly of newspaper-photographies and classical epigrams, which aims at showing the cyclic recurrence in the human history of periods of crisis and war and at the same time at foreshadowing its transformation. The political and intellectual strength of Brecht’s poetry finally reveals the high artistic quality and the deep esthetic thought which sustains it.