Del "Deus abconditus" al Ser que es palabrael pensamiento religioso de José María Valverde en su poesía

Abstract

The object of study of this thesis is the religious thought of José María Valverde that emerges from his poetic production. The study of the religious thought of José María Valverde addresses the singular and unique contribution of the Extremaduran poet who combines in his work both the philosophical and poetic dimensions along with a very personal experience of the Catholic faith, which over the years will gradually be refined and purified to consummate maturity. The objectives of the thesis are the following: a) Review both the person of the poet and the context in which his work develops. b) Analyze the experience of the hidden God, which manifests itself in adolescent faith, an image of distant God. c) Explore the divine presence in the surroundings, reactivating the feeling of transcendence in the poet and thus converting it into a transversal poetic motif. d) Study the feeling of waiting and, even more, of hope when overcoming past times full of certainties and securities. e) Analyze how the religious feeling that emerges from the poet can be expressed or translated into language. f) Examine Valverde's Christian faith placed at the service of the poor and disinherited. Regarding the methodology used, it is based on the study of the complete original poetic texts of José María Valverde, as well as the theoretical essays, countless opinion articles in magazines, the correspondence maintained with writers, philosophers and men of culture and Faith; and other writings whose subject matter is limited to the research object of this thesis. The material read and analyzed from the Valverde Personal Fund, which is gathered in the CRAI - Library of the Pavilion of the Republic, has been fundamental for its development. The results or conclusions of the thesis are, among others, the following: 1. The post-war years and the cultural environment framed in national-Catholicism decisively influence the world view of a young poet who begins to delve into the Spanish cultural panorama. 2. In the religious experience, God's silence becomes one of its culminating milestones. The absence of God colors the poetic voice with marked existential anguish that cannot free itself from an increasingly threatening fear. 3. The God who hides leaves open a path along which to travel in search of him, a small opening, a spigot to try to approach his presence. Valverdian poetics places its emphasis on the small, on immanence, on nature as a path to the divine. 4. The God who prefers to hide leaves an invisible trail through creatures and offers the virtue of hope, an elliptical condition characteristic of man. But hope also has another dimension and it is the one that Valverde wants to accentuate, hope in the human being based on the loving experience that gives meaning to existence, the avoidance of the abyss that constantly threatens the human being. 5. The God of hope is also the God who becomes language and creates the human being as a word-being. The awareness of language carries a series of implications that resemble the dark night of the soul, the realization that spiritual activity is always linguistic since there is no thought without language. 6. The God of hope inevitably transforms into the God of the poor. Christianity cannot avoid this preferential option for the most disadvantaged. Valverde becomes a voice for those who have seen how their own voice has been taken away from them.