The objective correlative and dramatic monologue in Antonio Colinas’s Poetry

Abstract

The members of the Spanish poetic generation of the novísimos are known for practicing culturalism; namely, the use of references from High and Mass Cultures. One of its most representative members is Antonio Colinas. His cultural references function as a reflexion on existentialist issues such as the survival of the human being through art, the passing of time, and Mediterranean-life oriented... In this article I analyze the most important objective correlative and dramatic monologues—two characteristic features of culturalism—in Colinas’s poetic corpus. The objective correlative (a term developed by T. S. Eliot) is a mechanism that “externalizes” or “objectifies” the poet’s thoughts through objects, characters or the reconstructed situations in the poem. The dramatic monologue is a particular type of the objective correlative that mediates the poet’s thoughts through the voice of a fictional or historical subject.