Entre "poesis" y "scientia": aspectos del alfabeto poético de la naturaleza en Antonio Machado y Eugenio Montale

Abstract

This investigation arises in the wake of the existence of promising and not yet examined affinities between Antonio Machado’s detailed notions about landscape and Eugenio Montale’s wide geo-botanical knowledge; he knew and admired Andalusian poet’s work thanks to the reading of Gerardo Diego’s Anthology. The article follows a comparative perspective between the literatures of two “sister” languages and finds its inspiration in the suggestive rhetorical question asked by the Sevillian author: “Nature is only an alphabet / of the poetic language / But, is there a better one?”.

The author of Campos de Castilla mentions an extraordinary quantity of wild or cultivated plants with the scientific exactitude of an expert naturalist and shares his “simply love of Nature” (and love towards the simplicity of Nature) with the author of Ossi di seppia; the “poetry of objects” by the Genovese poet, whose selection of vegetables specimens intuits Machado’s clear mark, is oriented towards those rough and rocky landscapes of his native Ligury region that reveal him cosmic values. Both poets share the same detailed look of hic et nunc, analogous descriptive strategies, a stilus miserorum and the description of neo-simbolic paysages de l’âme