The motif of solitude in the poetic career of Concha Lagos: La soledad de siempre (1958), Tema fundamental (1961), El cerco (1971) and Teoría de la inseguridad (1981).

La soledad de siempre (1958), Tema fundamental (1961), El cerco (1971) y Teoría de la inseguridad (1981)

Abstract

The poet Concha Lagos made her mark on the cultural scene with particular ease, above all through her editorship of the magazine Cuadernos de Ágora from 1956 to 1964; the founding of the Ágora poetry collection in 1955 and the Ágora poetry prize in 1962. Concepción Gutiérrez Torrero (1907-2007) was born in Córdoba and died in an old people's home in Las Rozas, Madrid. She managed to carve out a niche for herself in the capital's cultural industry, which was only slowly beginning to emerge during the years of autarchy. The maturity gained from a life of discomfort and renunciation had led Concha Lagos to become a woman with the potential to become a fundamental cultural agent of Spain's mid-century. In her poetry, which began to see the light of day in 1954, although the writing of her first book, Balcón, had begun much earlier, all the concerns of a universe that was by then already very personal would be expressed over the following decades. In the present work we will use the recently published memoirs of Concha Lagos to extract critical passages on the feeling of solitude which, as she herself states, is a constant in her poetic trajectory. Indeed, all the fundamental axes of Lagos's poetics are orchestrated around the motif of solitude in one way or another. We will therefore consider the different types of solitude that can be deduced from the autobiographical text and we will also try to identify them in the poetic works that are the object of the commentary. The fundamental aim is to unravel how this feeling was polysemic for the poet and how it is, in effect, resemanticised throughout her poetic work in order to reach a conclusion aligned with philosophical approaches of vitalist existentialism.