  In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in
some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the twentieth century.
These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then
compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show
how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as
noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic
elements in Spec XP projections at various levels of constituency. Then we
introduce LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) as the theory that allows us to
connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and
psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two
computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first
one uses best online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second
one uses Getarun, the system created at Ca Foscari Computational Linguistics
Laboratory. As will be shown, the first approach is unable to cope with these
structures due to the use of only statistical probabilistic information. On the
contrary, the second one, being a symbolic rule based system, is by far
superior and allows also to complete both semantic an pragmatic analysis.
