Poetic inscription and epitaph: representation and metapoetic deepening from Jorge de Sena and Ruy Belo

Abstract

“Every poem an epitaph”, the famous line by T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”, reveals itself in an interpellative propositional sense, claming dimensions that were instituted as privileged objects of meditation by the author of Four Quartets (1941), such as time, subject and poetic word. As a poetic form and genre whose object pervades temporality as an important value, epitaph soon moved from the referential scope to claim, with elegy (but also with satire), the poetically condensed memory of the being in defiance of time. Between epitaph and death, we must consider tension and resistance of discourse to the erasure of subject in time, which modernity has reread and aesthetically multiangularized in creative experiences such as fragmentation, heteronomy or impersonalization. In these, poetic discourse is often self-reflected in its unstable condition, lived between the subject’s experience and irreducibility to that same experience. As sur-vival, the subject participates in this instability in positions that, in some contemporary poetry, along with more common re-readings of epitaph as homage or in memoriam, are presented as relevant experiences in the scope of (self)representation, to which reflections of metapoetic status are sometimes combined. This article proposes to account for these conditions and experiences through reflection on some epitaph-poems by Jorge de Sena and Ruy Belo.