«In un mondo diverso / illuminato dagli ordigni». Un esempio di riscrittura poetica della Grande Guerra fra Tardoantico e XXI secolo

Recent Italian poetry has often treated the Great War through the filter of family memories, and through comparison with conflicts from different historical periods, including Classical antiquity. My paper concentrates on a notable example of this trend, the collection Mortalissima parte (2008) by Massimo Bocchiola. Ostensibly concerned with the general theme of war throughout human history, the collection is in fact dominated by memories of the Great War on the one hand, and by allusions to (Late-)Ancient and Byzantine historiography on the other. I analyse the role played by Latin- and Greek-language sources on both the structural and thematic level, discussing the different ways the author engages with his hypotexts. I conclude by comparing the use of Classics in this ‘secondary’ war poetry with that of British War Poets as studied by Vandiver (2010), and I try to motivate their diverging choices of themes and models.