Poetic objectification of a shattered subject: the alchemical poetry of Josep Palau i Fabre

ABSTRACT A number of modern poets have presented their works as an alchemical endeavor. Their verses display the hermeneutical clues of an analogy that elaborates on a heterodox ancestral practice and that simultaneously assumes poetry’s experimental nature. Alchemical poetology constitutes thus a specific alternative of contemporary poetic expression, and it stands out for its elements’ material treatment. The article describes and exemplifies various procedures of poetic objectification through which Josep Palau i Fabre’s works between 1937 and 1952 dissolve the traditional distance between object and subject and compose a world of objects where words, sounds and meanings arbitrarily collide beyond any subjective assessment. The material and practical aspects of an alchemical poetology lead thus to a reassessment of the objective shift of Aesthetics derived from the philosophical shattering of the subject, since the poetic elements and the poems themselves manifest the inaccessibility of any complete subjective experience of the objects, independently of their form and condition. The main goal of the article is to contribute on providing a clearer description of the nuanced belief that brings together an alchemical poetology and experimental poetics. The intuition of the world’s horizontal and arbitrary order manifests in the accumulative and apparently unsuccessful poetic attempts of attaining the actual, most authentic self. The alchemical condition of poetry consists in the succession and collision of images that are not bound to conceptual representation, but that rather reflect their status as essays, as fragments of an ongoing experiment that would be inert should its material condition and its inexpressible core not always be considered. Only in the succession and accumulation of such images finds Palau i Fabre’s alchemical poetry its consummation, faithful to the plurality and inconformity of all metaphors, and always pushed to further approaches, to endless experimentation.