ABSTRACT
A British poet who has gone into voluntary exile in Majorca realizes, while finalizing his attempt to carve a 'historical grammar of poetic myth', that every discourse on mythology must necessarily confront the legacy of Socrates. Giorgio Agamben's 1977 book Stanzas recomposes the discord between poetry and critical-philological disciplines. This constellation, corresponding to the medical symptomatology of melancholy as described since antiquity, and which also leaves persistent traces in essay 'Mourning and Melancholia', is traditionally connected with noonday, and corresponds to the creature known by patrology as the noonday demon. Giacomo Leopardi devotes to the noonday demon the seventh chapter of his 1815 Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi [Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients]: interestingly, this erudite work of the young Leopardi is the only reference provided by Agamben for a definition of this phenomenon.
