Manuel Álvarez Ortega y José Ángel Valente: poéticas paralelas hacia un mismo fulgor

In this article we propose an approach to the poetics of Manuel Álvarez Ortega and José Ángel Valente, focusing on the meditative substratum they share. Not only it recovers the native mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Ávila and Miguel de Molinos, among others, but also the wider European legacy of the metaphysical poets championed by John Donne, of unquestionable importance for both authors. Valente in «Luis Cernuda y la poesía de la meditación» (2002b) discusses how Miguel de Unamuno and Luis Cernuda initially rescued this tradition, in whose line and absorbing its legacy we find not only Valente himself, but also Álvarez Ortega and other younger authors. As a whole, they form a meditative current that runs through the generations of the 20th century. An intertextual perspective will be adopted based on the definitions provided by Julia Kristeva in Semiótica 2 (1981) with the concept of intertextuality as an «espacio textual multiple» (1981: 67) where a network of texts and meanings is embedded, and Gerard Genette in Palimpsestos (1989) when he speaks of transtextuality, which also encompasses that myriad of manifest or secret relations of the text with other texts (1989: 9-10). Through such a theoretical tool it will be possible to measure the depth of the dialogue established between the two trajectories. Despite not being explicitly linked, on the one hand they share a perspective on reality and poetry, whose common foundation is a regeneration that can only be achieved through destruction;on the other hand, also the symbols through which they express it.