Blas de Otero: Analysis of Poetic Techniques and Themes

Blas de Otero: Poetic Techniques and Themes

In the first poem of the book, the author announces the abandonment of his earlier, distraught poetry and declares: "I give all my poems for a man / in peace." This solidarity has allowed him to overcome his feelings of anguish. The poems on Spain are about love and pain, with its distant past remembered with pain, and love of its lands. Blas de Otero recalls his demands for peace, justice, and freedom, and proclaims his faith and hope for a better Spain.

In terms of style, his work has grown from the dramatic tones of previous books to simpler issues, but behind that simplicity often hides a hard work in the presence of abundant phonetic and lexical parallels, etc. Que trata de España is a large collection of poems, highlighted by the many poems dedicated to singing of the Spanish lands. Within the poems dedicated to Spain, there is significant stylistic concentration. New shades appear: irony, nonchalance... And secondly, there is an increased presence of popular themes.

Blas de Otero's lyricism makes use of verses from other writers. Otero's poetic language includes:

• Alliteration: Repetition of sounds (the sea breaks in the sea).
• Paranomasia: Similar-sounding names (hymen huge, kiss kiss).
• Synesthesia: Mixing of senses (the green silence).
• Intertextuality: Verses of other poets with changed words (the river of time until death, self and non-being).
• Neologism: A word that does not exist (counter).
• Overlap: Ending a verse abruptly, leaving it in the middle.
• Gradation: (see, sailing, kills).
• Anaphora: Repetition of a word at the beginning of the next sentence (kiss as ... kiss as ....).
• Hyperbaton: Exaggeration (as if to kiss Comco).
• Reduplication: The same words which are followed (BESOS, BESOS of God).
• Apostrophe: Call for an absent person (oh god, oh god, oh god...).
• Paradox: Contradiction (a kiss that makes you cry / echoing silence).
• Anadiplosis: Last word of the first verse is repeated in another (... inconsolably. inconsolably).
• Adverbial phrases: To stop time (tooth to tooth / vein to vein / night night).
• Polysyndeton: Repetition of conjunctions (O sun and eras and were Llubi O Thursday).
• Asyndeton: Listing with commas (holy, holy, holy).