Poética del Caminar: Poems (1817) de John Keats

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Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706

Presented by Diego Alegria Corona, PhD candidate, literary studies, UW-Madison

About the presentation: In this presentation, the author overviews his essay collection “Poética del caminar: ‘Poems’ (1817) de John Keats” (Ril Editores, 2023). This book proposes a poetics of walking in the first poetry collection published by the romantic author. This poetics entails the intersection of three types of movements: 1) the physical or referential, identified by the representation of suburban, middle-class gardens through an aesthetics of the “gardenesque”; 2) the analogical or metaphorical, understood as the association between walking and flying, prompted by the faculty of fancy; and 3) the allegorical or metaliterary, characterized by the prosodic and syntactic enactment of walking as a process of reading and writing.

The second part of this presentation focuses on the article “Modernismo o Romanticismo Transatlántico: José Martí y William Wordsworth,” included in this essay collection. By contrasting the allegories of literature in Wordsworth’s “Preface” (1802) to “Lyrical Ballads,” and Martí’s “Prólogo al ‘Poema del Niágara’ de Juan Pérez Bonalde” (1882), this article suggests that the movement of Spanish American “Modernismo” constitutes both an affirmation and a negation of Romanticism, that is, a manifestation of Romanticism’s critical reason and self-definition as literature in the Spanish American sphere, and a denial of Romanticism as a European cultural period, and as a metropolitan literary model.

About the presenter: Diego Alegría (Santiago de Chile, 1994) holds a BA in English Linguistics and Literature, and an MA in Literature from the University of Chile. He is currently a Doctoral Candidate in English (Literary Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a Minor in Spanish and a Certificate in Public Humanities. His scholarly work is situated at the intersection of poetics, rhetoric, and grammar in the long-nineteenth century, particularly the poetry of British Romanticism and Spanish American “Modernismo.” He is the author of the poetry book “Raíz abierta” (2015), the bilingual chapbook “y sin embargo los umbrales / and yet the thresholds” (2019), and the essay collection “Poética del Caminar: ‘Poems’ (1817) de John Keats” (2023). He is currently a Mellon-Public Humanities Fellow at WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio through the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities.