The World as Garden: Versions of Pastoral in Emily Dickinson and Olvido García Valdés

Abstract

Abstract: This paper contributes to the exploration of Emily Dickinson's influence on contemporary Spanish poetry through an examination of the trajectory of Olvido García Valdés, a poet born in 1950 who stands out for her very singular lyrical program, based on an extensive philosophical knowledge and on a close attention to nature, features that can be found in Dickinson's oeuvre and that reflect what could be labelled as a common pastoral impulse. This article explores the terms of this dialogue, focusing on both poets' approach to nature as the place where truth resides. The apparent prominence of the natural world in their works is a sign of not only its splendor and multiplicity but also its darkness and adversity. The extent to which nature encompasses violence and death offers a lesson in immanence that impedes any symbolic reading, thus giving place to figural closure and allegory. Plenitude is then projected into the past, into states of childhoods that, though nostalgically remembered in an elegiac tone familiar to the genre, are nonetheless as impossible to access as haunted and sealed houses. In a third and last move, the present is posited as a void, a space of emptiness where every voice can only be posthumous.