The Literary Topos of the <em>Falling Leaves</em> in the Latin American Poetry of the XX Century

Abstract

The motif of the falling leaves has a double meaning in Western literature: meta-literary and affective-existential. The purpose of this article is to present an analytical and interpretative overview of the different variants, linguistic formulas, and meanings that the lyrical affective-existential function of this motif went through in twentieth-century Latin American poetry, particularly during the Postmodernismo and Vanguardias, until the semantic variations that it acquired in the second half of the twentieth-century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The explicit intention of the Vanguardias was to reject the literary tradition, in particular, the legacy of subjectivity of Romanticism, during which the topos of the falling leaves was one of its highest expressions. Its semantic core, we argue, expresses the end of a loving relationship (during Romanticism and Post-romanticism) or a life (in the twentieth-century), and it is depicted, mainly, in narrative poems.