Un'influenza senza angoscia: l'ombra lunga di Emilio Villa negli scritti di Corrado Costa

The purpose of this paper is to weigh Emilio Villa's critical contribution to our understanding of the writings of Corrado Costa. To classify the network of suggestions and textual references binding the two authors, I have used the definition of "influence without anxiety" (with explicit reference to the category coined by Harold Bloom). This is to indicate how Costa absorbed the Villa model especially in his early writings. On this basis, he then built his own experimental adventure in an independent way. The investigated writings are a short anthology of texts selected by Emilio Villa and dedicated to his friend (under the title Scegliendo Pel da Pelo. Cristomazia lirico – retrospettiva – inedita 1944-1970 a cura e hasard del medesimo. Per Corrado Costa). These writings show, on the one hand, that Villa refused to contaminate his work with the intertextuality intended for a contemporary poet (not even in a work formally addressed to one of his most faithful companions and collaborators). The "missing dialogue" is in the Flippant ball-feel collection. It apparently meant to accompany the flipper poems by Corrado Costa and William Xerra at the 1973 Mana market exhibition, but actually turned to great models of the Past, such as the Classics and the Pre-Socratics. On the other hand, the collections selected for Corrado Costa (Ripetibile. Per Emilio Villa, Continuando a parlare in tema di silenzio and Montagna bianca) fundamentally depend on Villa's work as to some of the following topics (aphasia, the problem with combinatorial poetry, heraclitean suggestions) and rhetorical devices (mathematical and scientific language, the use of parenthesis and division signs). Costa eventually manages to overcome his early bond to the model, but you can still find traces and sediments in his works of a "primordial" influence.