Guillermo Valencia and French Poetic Theory

Abstract

Various critics have pointed out Valencia's interest in and debt to Parnassian and Symbolist esthetics of the French nineteenth century. Craig has written that Leyendo a Silva is a perfect example of Parnassian method and has described Los Camellos as an equally fine example of the Symbolist mood and manner.l Similarly Sanin Cano has placed Valencia in both schools, while maintaining that he belongs to neither completely, that the Colombian poet acept6 todas las maneras de forma y de sentido en que el hombre puede realizar la verdadera poesia.2 Garcia Prada, in his anthology of Modernist poetry, has written: Valencia forj6, cincel6 y puli6 su lenguaje con esmero de clisico et de parnassiano, daindole al mismo tiempo nuevas resonancias e inquietantes perspectivas de indiscutible modernidad.3 The present article atempts to indicate further possible relationships between Valencia's poems and statements on the nature of poetry and the poet's function made by French Parnassians and Symbolists. These statements were widely read in poetic circles, both in France and in the Hispanic world. Basically they have to do with the interdependance of form and idea. Poetry in France before the Romantic revolution had come to mean embellished statement. The fundamental esthetic dilemma was the re-integration of ornament-visible form, poetic imagination, the capacity to evoke in the reader emotive states similar to or identical with the poet'sand significant meaning. This dilemma was the major one for most poets who began to write in the nineteenth century. And while it is quite likely true that each national poetry has a tradition where poets could discover such a successful welding of form and idea (e.g., Dari6's use of earlier Spanish poetic forms), the prominence given in France to the discussion of the problem and ways of solving this basic question in poetry called the attention of poets not writing in French to read and study the various c itical articles, prefaces and poems of Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Verlaine, and Baudelaire.