The Poetry Research of J.V. Foix (1918-1985)

Overview & Synopsis

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the literary and journalistic works of the poet J.V. Foix (1893-1987), one of the most original voices of the Iberian avant-gardes, focusing on his poetics and communication of knowledge. Early in his life, this active arbiter of taste and experimental writer of prose poems described his endeavor as a ‘poetry research’. He sought independence from all isms and wrote classicizing sonnets, oneiric oneiric poems, and fictional chronicles. He despised bourgeois art and rejected art’s subjection to passing aesthetic and political trends. His poetic and ethical commitment was to ‘living reality’, which he claimed to share with artists of all eras and with the best poets of his time. The monograph critically assesses Foix’s articulation of a realist poetology. This clarifies his position in the fragmentary panorama of the avant-garde and revises traditional surrealist readings of his works. Rather than establishing a separate poetic reality accessible via dualistic or idealistic modes of thought, his obscure metaphors and inconclusive narrations stage the impossibility of such a detachment. Instead, poetic objects, consistently considered as ‘likenesses’, are identified as constituent elements of a practice of accumulation of fragments. These likenesses lead him – and us – to an ever-renewing adventure toward the encounter with the common and the unbelievable alike. Foix’s research, in prose, verse, and essay, is a tireless exercise in the embracement of actual plurality with aesthetic pluralism, which informs his views on culture, politics, and religion. The book appeals to both students and researchers of the European avant-gardes, and especially to literary critics and aesthetics scholars interested in modern, artistic and essayistic poetics of knowledge.