About heros and urns: Guillermo Valencia, Simón Bolívar and the nation as ruin

Abstract

Guillermo Valencia furnishes the most salient example of a modernista poet of aristocratic origins who boasted a remarkable cosmopolitan repertoire and a paternalistic oratory drawn from Catholic doctrine. On the basis of this cultural capital and his long experience as congressman and journalist, he became a presidential candidate at the 1918 and 1930 elections. Since then, his poetry and life have been accorded the hagiographic treatment that Colombian institutions reserve for their founding fathers. The present essay offers a critique of the structures of domination underlying Valencia’s use of the Parnassian, philo- Hellenic, and elegiac discourses in the work produced in the years 1924-1934. In this decade he published his most striking urn-poems as well as numerous Bolivarian speeches that take the cinerary vessel as their main symbol. Resorting to the imagery of votive offerings, Valencia sublimates the mourning experienced for his electoral defeats and the ruination of conservative institutions into the construction of a lordly community united by the rituals of collective martyrdom on the altar of the motherland.