This undergraduate thesis explores the contexts in which death appears in three poetry collections by Jure Detela and four poetry collections by Miklavž Komelj. It establishes that the two poets have similar fundamental views about death, but that in their poetry the emphases concerning the topic are different. For Jure Detela, the purpose of poetry is primarily to unveil the manipulative mechanisms of a society that brings about individual deaths in the name of the collective, whereas Miklavž Komelj understands poetry more as a way to transcend the boundaries between the categories of life and death. Despite their different approaches, the question of death in their respective poetry can nevertheless be classified into four principal categories: the notion of one’s own death as understood by Martin Heidegger; death as a consequence of magic; the estrangement of a person wishing death on no one; the abolishment of the binary categories of life and death. Incorporating the awareness that death can only be grasped through the prism of one’s own mortality and a life lived to its fullest, the poetry of the two authors opens a horizon of immortality and the infinite interconnectedness of fates, where death is never the end and where everything is part of a single, eternal transformation.
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