On poetry and the evil of living: Amelia Rosselli and Hilda Hilst, a dialogue

Abstract

The article aims to bring into contact the female poetry of two brilliant poets: Amelia Rosselli and Hilda Hilst. Each one, in their own way and style of writing and thinking about poetry, with peculiar life paths and stories, thematize love as desire, the life drive and the death drive, Eros and Thanatos, showing that the "most intimate and profound moments of individual experience are capable of generating a poetry of disquieting poetic force" (Bosi, 1997). In Rosselli, the trauma generated by the death of her father gave rise to irreparable psychic suffering, persecution manias and obsessive delusions that tormented her throughout her life and led her to constant hospitalizations, resulting in her suicide. The story of her poetic writing is intertwined with the story of her own life. In Hilst, desire, associated with the death drive, appears represented, as in Rosselli, in the constant dialogue with the dead, in the evocation of classical myths, wrapped in an erotic and mystical, oneiric and mnemonic atmosphere, which produces poetry that is embodied through a vacillating, fragmented, obsessive and deeply vigorous writing.