Ernestina de Champourcin: A Poet and Her Poetics

Abstract

ERNESTINA de Champourcin was a prolific poet who published in the 1920s at the same time as the members of the Generation of 27. She was one of the two female poets included in Gerardo Diego's landmark anthology of 1934, and she was called a prophetic priestess by Juan Ramon Jimenez in one of his lyrical portraits of his contemporaries collected in Espanoles de tres mundos. These gestures of recognition notwithstanding, her work has been marginalized from the official Spanish canon and, until very recently, forgotten. Her exclusion has been explained through a myriad of possible reasons: because her gynocentric style conflicts with the prevailing androcentric one (Wilcox), because her marriage diverted her attention to her husband (Ciplijauskaite), because of the condescension and sexism of critics and of her devotion to Juan Ramon (Debicki), or simply because La tragedia de su vida fue nacer mujer en un mundo hecho a medida de los hombres (Cardoso). Some recent critics have tried to vindicate this exclusion by including her in their monographs on Spanish women poets (Wilcox, Perez). Others have attempted to certify her as a poet in other ways. Jose Angel Ascunce calls her one of the most important women poets of the Generation of 27 (Prologue xi), and Luzmaria Jimenez Faro maintains she is the only woman poet of that group (Champourcin Antologia 11). What critics have not done yet is to treat her purely as a poet, as a professional writer who evolves over time in her relationship to her concept of poetry. Over her long career, Champourcin's poetry evolves from a repository for emotions to a site for aesthetic invention and finally to a vehicle of communication and transcendence. Her poetic persona begins as a passive receiver of poetry to become an active agent of creation and then a converser with sublime forces. Her changing creative posture mirrors the chronological progression of her life and the substantive advancement in the psychological development of her poetic speaker. The incipient poet speaks with the selfabsorption that characterizes the adolescent psyche. As the adult poet emerges, her poetic persona gains a sense of self-assurance that facilitates an assertive stance before the poetic enterprise. The mature woman finds self-fulfillment through poetry because it provides her a means to the jouissance or joy that spiritual transfiguration and harmony generate. These phases readily suggest the three basic stages in the development of the self. birth, growth, and maturity. But they also outline the transcendent possibilities of poetry. The evolution of Champourcin's concept of poetry from spontaneous inspiration to conscious execution and then to a form of communication with God recalls Antonio Machado's poem beginning Anoche cuando dormia / son ;bendita ilusion... , with its three images of fountain, beehive, and sun as symbols of the ascending trajectory of faith, life, or the poetic process. For Machado, as well as for Champourcin, the ultimate vision is that of God, but, while her predecessor only sees his bendita ilusion in a dream state, Champourcin's relationship is that of direct, devout, and conversational contact. Furthermore, Champourcin goes beyond the implications revealed in her interchanges with the Deity, to discover that ultimately only poetry produces spiritual freedom and transcendence. Despite the multiple functions that poetry fulfilled for her, Champourcin's conscious posture toward her creative process was modest and evasive. Therefore, her changing conception of poetry must be inferred from her poems directly setting forth her poetics rather than from her prose statements. From the very beginning, she refused to theorize about poetry and, upon reflection, she denied it any transcendent purpose. She declined to provide her poetics for Diego's anthology, saying instead ?Mi concepto de la poesia? Carezco en absoluto de conceptos (Diego 460). She resisted accepting credit or responsibility for her poetic confections, preferring to see herself as the fortunate recipient of poetry's splendid gifts. …