Hľadanie absolútnej poézie (od čistej poézie k ne-poézii: Bremond, Hlbina, Silan a Groch)
A search for absolute poetry. From pure poetry to non-poetry (Bremond, Hlbina, Silan, and Groch)

Summary/Abstract: In the early 1930s, a group of young Catholic poets entered the Slovak literary scene with a new approach to the creation of poetry derived from mysticism. Poets Pavol Gašparovič Hlbina (1908 – 1977), Rudolf Dilong (1905 – 1986), and Ján Haranta (1909 – 1983) found encouragement in the works La Poésie pure ([Pure poetry], 1926) and Prière et Poésie (Prayer and Poetry, 1926) by Henri Bremond who proposed aesthetic instructions that should lead to absolute poetry. The paradoxes of mysticism and poetry, however, proved to be unachievable in poetic practice, even less so when blended with new avant-garde movements of poeticism and surrealism. The most notable approach to absolute poetry in the first half of the 20th century can be found in the work of Janko Silan (1914 – 1984), whose epic-dramatic poetry, self-referential character of verse, and natural-human pantheistic and panentheistic view of the world eventually surpassed poetic spontaneity, wordplay, and Freudian psychoanalytic method. The most radical attempt at absolute poetry came after 1989 with the work of Erik Jakub Groch (b. 1957), who, through depoeticisation, reaches the threshold between literature and mysticism, pursuing goals in both the literary and extra-literary space. An important aim of Groch's absolute poetry is an attempt to execute transfer from literary to actual epiphanies.

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