‘Elementargedicht’. Sebald und Zanzotto

The essay addresses the relationship between nature and poetry between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium from a comparative perspective by
taking as case studies the first collection of poems by W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), Nach der
Natur. Elementargedicht (1988) and the last by Andrea Zanzotto (1921–2011), Conglomerati
(2009). Specifically, I will investigate the forms of ‘Naturgedicht’ in its elementary declination and oppose it to the lyrical tradition by means of a phenomenological and eco-poetic
re-reading of post-Romantic poetry. By distinguishing ‘Gedicht’ and ‘Lyrik’ on a formal
and epistemological level, the objective of the article will be twofold: on the one hand,
to historically and theoretically disambiguate the ‘Naturgedicht’ tradition built around the
nexus of the ‘Welt-ich’; on the other, to perform a hermeneutic analysis of Sebald’s and
Zanzotto’s poems. Finally, the essay will try to offer an innovative historical-theoretical
approach to read the relationships between the (lyric) subject, poetry and nature, and also
to rethink from a diachronic perspective the evolution of the concepts of ‘Naturpoesie’
and ‘Naturlyrik’ within the current eco-poetics debate.