“La gran miseria humana”, from Gabriel Escorcia Gravini: a Necropoetic Reading of Columbia in the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate how the necro-poetic discourse that Colombian poet Gabriel Escorcia Gravini (1892-1920) deploys in his poem “La gran miseria humana” (1918), questions the seemingly immobile aesthetic and political frontiers that separate the isolated Caribbean region of the country from the rest of the cities located more towards the center of it. More specifically, it shows how said necropoetic discourse appeals to the aesthetization of the deceased beloved and to the re-appropriation and consequent politicization that the poetic subject makes of his own melancholy to thus establish a series of analogical concatenations between the terms “cemetery”, “skull”, and “exhumer”, and “poetry”, “poem”, and “poet”, respectively. Once underpinned by this meta-referential structure, the poem, according to this reading, manages to inscribe the Caribbean topoi in the Colombian literary tradition of the time.