De Eros a Tánatos: un viaje por el mundo poético de Manuel Figueroa Meléndez

Abstract

The poet Manuel Figueroa Meléndez is one of the outstanding figures of the PuertoRicans eighties writers. His poems reveal different way of eroticism, the main element of investigation in this research project. The works here analyzed are: Mi pequeño Augusto (1984), Caminantes por el caduceo del tiempo (1988), Contigo he abierto el paraíso (1990), Sobre una acrópolis hispánica (1994), …en las islas Vírgenes (2000), y Atardecer en el Atlántico (2004). This study uses the main theoretical postulates about eroticism developed by George Bataille, Erich Fromm, Octavio Paz and Herbert Marcuse. In order to explore the different paths of Eros in Figueroa Meléndez poetry we analyze his verses by establishing a route or a journey of research. The poetic voice of these verse uses different images and elements as: the seed, the liquid, the stars, the sea, the eyes, among others, to recreate the different forms of eroticism. In the process detailed how the poetic speaker comes to the pleasures of erotic joy trough a Dionysian poetic world. However, the ephemerality of pleasures never lasts long enough and sentences the lyrical subject to move to another stage that relies on memory as an attempt to overcome the decadence of time. At the final points of this investigative journey the lyrical voice ends up moving to his last destination, one that’s majorly influenced by Thanatos: the point of death.