Figure and Flight: the Image of Lightness in Jorge Oteiza’s Poetry

Abstract

Throughout his career as a poet, Jorge Oteiza insisted on the metaphor of lightness, in order to represent his own spiritual quest: a rather personal and unorthodox attempt that derives from very diverse sources. In his untypical bias, stemming from his experiences in America and his recovery of historical pre–war avant–garde art, the poet built his own argument in order to come to terms with his own existential anguish. This paper studies the nature of Oteiza’s poetic image, his constant dialogue with his own plastic work and contemporary culture and his treatment of lightness –flight, the figure of the angel, and so on- through a close reading of his poems. The result is a characterization of Oteiza as a neo-vanguardist against the background of Spanish poetry between 1950 and 1990, whose work betrays an unexpected and post metaphysical religious trend.