Quevedo y su recepción y huella en la poesía del Siglo XX (De Rubén Darío a José Emilio Pacheco)

Abstract

The metaphysical and love poetry of the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) has exceeded all the dynamics that writing at that time had imposed: its rhetoric shows the intimacy of the poet's feelings and his anguish in a way that it approaches him to the existentialist pain of a contemporary man. Quevedo was valued as a Humanist thinker and an original concept-maker both, in his own life as well as in his writings; thus, Quevedo's verbal inventions, ideological perspectives, and innovative expressions that renewed the Petrarchan and Cancioneril traditions, have been intensely reread by Contemporary poets.

First, I delimit some of Quevedo's poetics that called the attention of 20th Century poetic generations, contextualizing them in the Baroque period. Stemming from Dámaso Alonso's seminal study, "El desgarrón afectivo en la poesía de Quevedo," I focus on the term "affective tearing" in the context of Renaissance anthropology (affectus is defined as the rhetorical, semantic and syntactical lyrical expressions that manifest the breakup of the analogical traditional world view).

The influence of Quevedo at the beginning of the 20th century is explored in the second chapter in the figure of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío through the legacies of the Baroque time during the Modernist period. Having broken the link between the symbol and the symbolized, Darío had to reformulate some poetic concepts.

In the third chapter, I concentrate on the term "sincerity" as a rhetorical trope that connects passion and intellect, after Gracián's theory of poetical language, a motto for the avant guard poets, both Spanish and Latin Americans, living in Europe before WWII. I explore their poetics and the legacies from the Baroque and the Romanticism as they had to work in a diverse symbolic horizon, very different from their predecessors.

In the fourth chapter I focus on the poetic dialogue between Quevedo and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo regarding the transcendence in death and through the body.

Finally, I trace the legacy of Quevedo in the second half of the 20th century in the poems of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. Some of Quevedo's topics are glossed, others are rethought, others are adapted to new contexts, but all these poets recognize their debt to the Spanish Baroque poet. In order to demonstrate that Quevedo's poetry continues to be reread and rewritten, I conclude my study with the works published in the 21st century by the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco.