Poetry in «plen air». Phenomenologies of nature in Joan Maragall and Georg Trakl

At first sight, the familiarities between Joan Maragall and Georg Trakl seem non-existent, but when we focus on their use of rhyme and the approach they develop before writing, both their similarities and differences are highlighted. This article first explores the similitudes between the two writers to emphasise their divergences. Both poets are coetaneous and, therefore, experiment reality in a very similar way: objects are closer to them than sensations. For that reason, their bodies, at the centre of the poem, mediate and extract the precise words and rhymes needed to create the technical and sensible stimulus versed in the poem.
It is from this position that both poets will forge their relationship with nature: both artists aim to transform the finite view on nature and landscape into an infinite one. However, while Trakl presents nature from a phenomenological perspective of reality and existence, Maragall sets forth a proper arrangement of the landscape, so that the gaze is oriented towards the infinity of possibilities of ever-changing existence. Hence, I argue that it is precisely in the formal approach to nature that they can be simultaneously compared and differentiated.