Carlos Murciano's «Tiempo de ceniza» (1961): between the commitment and the renewal of language in a poet from Arcos de la Frontera

Abstract

It was not until 1983 when Carlos Murciano (Arcos de la Frontera, 1931) devoted himself exclusively to literature. His literary career is, however, very broad, although we will only refer to the lyrical work. The poet accumulates more than thirty titles in verse, the first being El alma repartida and the last Sonetos para ella, published in Ars Poética in 2018. In 1970 he won the National Poetry Prize for Este claro silencio, that was his highest award. He participated in the founding of the poetry magazine Alcaraván (1949), which was the result of a group of friends who formed the «School of Arcos de la Frontera». With such a track record of awards, participation in Spanish cultural life and extensive poetic work, it is surprising that Murciano is outside the canon of the poets of the mid-century traditionally generated because of anthologies with historicist zeal. Perhaps this recalcitrant exclusion is a condition shared by several Andalusian poets as they often had to claim from their own anthologies and oriented towards Andalusia as a theme. But, fundamentally, the poetry of Murciano is tremendously personalistic and is crossed from beginning to end by an irresolvable tension between the self and the others, between the historical time and the static time of the conscience and, as such, it is a meditative poetry that escapes to the watertight categorizations and that often surprises for being clear and other times for being conceptist and aestheticist in excess. We will present a brief trajectory of Murciano's work through the anthologies at first, and then we will dwell on Tiempo de ceniza (1961). The aim of the work is to determine the aesthetic keys of Murciano's poetry and, in particular, of the collection of poems selected as an example of this tension between commitment and introspection.