Confluence, Field Theory, and Juan Larrea’s Versión Celeste

Abstract

In the entry for March 6, 1932, in Orbe (Orb), a sort of intellectual diary that Juan Larrea kept from 1926 to 1932, the poet wrote: “The concept that the two conflicting elements, the personal element and the social element, which I have found in me, fuse forming a new and invulnerable individuality in relation with the partial force of other individualities, presents evidently an essential point of contact with the atomic theory” (128–129). At the time of this writing Larrea was reading an article on atomic disintegration in Lu, a French journal. The combination of positive and negative electric charges in the internal constitution of the atom presented to Larrea a helpful analogy for his own search for the essential in self and art. This is one among many instances in this author’s prose and poetic works where an analogy with science illustrates his personal and artistic search.