Inner paths: the poetics of Juan Antonio Gonzalez Fuentes

Abstract

This essay reviews various poets of the 20th century who were influenced by the European avant-gardes and by their historical context, a warlike and hopeless context. Specifically, it focuses on Juan Antonio González Fuentes, who defined himself as a desolate poet. Like his contemporaries, he used haikus and prose poetry to compose his works. Following the knowledges of María Zambrano, he chose topics such as the abyss, the black hole, the void as a myth and as the origin of life, the abyssal existence. He combined all this with ellipses, secrecy, enigmas, subtle allusions, which sometimes gave rise to fragmented and opaque poems, which sometimes require specialization to understand them. In short, these features built his own style, bare and concise.