Roberto de las Carreras and Meaning of the Pose in Modernist Poetics

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of the «pose» in modernist poetry with a starting point in two of its emblematic figures: Julio Herrera y Reissig and Roberto de las carreras and a photograph taken to Julio Herrera y Reissig in 1907, which showed him injecting himself morphine. More than the madness or irreverence shared by both poets of the 1900’s, the pose is for the author a kind of external being which corresponds to sensation. The paper tries to consider posing as an expression of a refined authenticity, these forms that express in their statuary image the most scathing and sharp criticism to a society which is hypocritical and constained to its puritanisms. The pose is not the usual figure of the daring poet whose rudness claims for the position of poetry. They probably trusted pose more than the literary work itself, in the ambition of being the incarnate verse, not in order to save the pain in the poem, but to save the experience of poetry.