ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the understanding of the dynamics between poetry and disease by exposing one of the layers that shapes poetry that is seldom considered in courses on literature and illness. This is the Western tradition of modern poetry. Since this poetic language is well established in the canon, it is essential to understand how it relates to disease. Modern poetry keeps its own antidote within itself, preventing it from becoming a fossilizing discourse. Ultimately, poems of disease bring us closer to the tragic problem of incommunicability. The chapter first presents a synthesis of the (post)structuralist debate on the ‘death of the author’. Next, it shows how medicine has assembled a mythology of language to justify its authority. Third, modern poetics will be characterized as a suitable medium for chaotic experiences of illness. Finally, the book of poems Diary of Death by Enrique Lihn (in 2018) will allow us to study how a terminal cancer diagnosis finds its means of expression in a poetry that constantly denies the possibility of saying something valuable and even dehumanizes the sick person. Modern poetry shows the impossibility of communicating, leading us to a final reflection on authorship and an ethics of failure.
