They Sail to Byzantium: Spanish Women Poets and Ageing

Bellver, Catherine

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (2014), 91, (5), 493–512.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2014.31
Language: English
Pages: 20

Abstract

Old age is seen less as golden years than as a gloomy time of physical decline, loneliness, and loss. Scholars in a wide range of fields have been devoting increasingly more attention to different aspects of this last phase of life, but in literary criticism scant interest has been shown in exploring this theme in the poetry written by Spanish women. An analysis of what might be called the first generation of Spanish women poets uncovers noteworthy reflections on old age and death while revealing as well a stoicism or serenity that stems from the ability of their poetic speakers to divert their focus from material to spiritual or artistic concerns. The poetic personae of Concha Méndez, Ernestina de Champourcin, Carmen Conde, and Josefina de la Torre find varying types of antidotes for the pain of ageing, but they coincide in preserving their own particular existential postures.

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