Ten memorable works to understand poetry

Between the structure of modern lyricism and poetry from the antiquity, the energy of silence and word keep flowing, despite claims that after Auschwitz, lyricism was impossible. How can one choose ten poems among the almost infinite sequence of poems that create something from the fugitive, from the sacred or from the nothing? From Pindarus to Rilke, from Garcilaso to Baudelaire, any choice is a risk. Here are the ten poems of my big gamble.

8

La quête de Bronwyn

JUAN EDUARDO CIRLOT

(1971)

The forest of Arthurian novel, where not one tree has ever been described, reaches here verbal texture: we are entering a universo made of alliterations (“Un ruido me ha dejado entre las ruinas” [A noise has left me in ruins] is the first line in the poem) and the images of absolute unreality (“Castillos transparentes que no existen” [Transparent castles that do not exist]). The wandering bumps constantly into the impossibility to conquer the object searched, of the quête: too many dimensions and reality planes or unreality that compete against it. However, the poem concludes with some verses that cause a feeling of ecstasy reached by combining words: alas, olas, almas [wings, waves, souls].