Towards an Ecocritic reading of the Poem "Grillo" of Paz en la tierra (1939)

Abstract

One of the most characteristic and attractive features of Luis Valle Goicochea’s poetry lies in the author’s ability to fill his pages with different representations of the natural space and the non-human beings that inhabit it. Thus, among his production, we believe that a poem like “Grillo”, located in the collection of poems Paz en la tierra (1939) represents an unquestionable sample of the zoological poetics of the author from La Libertad, which seems to move away from a puerile and merely symbolic. Through the proposals of ecocriticism, a current of interpretation that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon academy, we will try to demonstrate that in the studied poem, the author achieves a transition from mere symbolic representation to move to the biology of the insect. The examination of this transit will be possible thanks to the interdisciplinary opening of ecocriticism, which will allow a review from General Textual Rhetoric, the intertextuality of Egurenian poetics and zoopoetic studies. All this will allow us to see not only a degree of consideration and importance towards the non-human being of the insect, but also a much deeper concern. Said concern will have as a receptacle the natural space chosen in the collection of poems, such as the Moche countryside and the context in which this book arose. Without leaving aside few but important paratexts, in the absence of more extensive studies on this collection of poems, we also allow ourselves to examine an important factor in relation to the imprint of a religious nature present in its pages.