Eduardo Cote Lamus

As a writer Cote was open to the most important artistic movements of his time, and in his poetry he was influenced by the Spanish poets of the Generation of ’27. He was particularly concerned with the poet’s task of constructing a corpus of poetry. From his penultimate book, La vida cotidiana (Daily Life) (1959), onwards, and drawing on the refreshing oxygen of his stay in Europe, he introduced new elements into his work. This book marks a turn towards a more objective poetry, and introduces a more colloquial, relaxed and anecdotal style.  La vida cotidiana gives the poet wings to penetrate the most intimate and fundamental issues of human experience, and to reveal them to the reader in a fluid and conversational manner, devoid of the inscrutability of his previous book, Los sueños (The Dreams).

With La vida cotidiana a new poetic axis appears – one where writing poetry is like speaking, like naming things without any rhetorical embellishments. The poem flows like everyday speech, which enables the ordinary person to understand and be touched by it. This approach represents great progress in Colombian poetic writing, preparing the terrain of expression for future generations. It arises from the poet’s encounter with various expatriate Nicaraguan writers, with whom he shared the experience of reading the Imagists and T. S Eliot’s views on the need to regain a conversational tone in poetry. In La vida cotidiana the poet condenses, in a balanced and succinct manner, the colloquial and the conceptual. This feature makes his writing unique and is the result of his hard and intense efforts as a “word worker”, attentive to the legacy of the great Spanish-language poets and to contemporary poets writing in other languages.

With Estoraques, his final publication, Eduardo Cote Lamus achieves his fullest expression. This is the book that identifies him as a poet and has a place among the most distinctive of Colombian poetic works. Estoraques is a long poem of five hundred lines, divided into eight parts. It was published four years after La vida cotidiana, and its appearance marks a high point in poetic creation. It is a poem with many qualities, among which its precision and great sense of rhythm are outstanding. It is surprising, too, that the inspiration for this work is the estoraques: rocky formations shaped by erosion. In the words of Andrés Holguín: “Reading this song, we find ourselves facing a wider version of death, which becomes a universal phenomenon. In the ‘estoraques’, those strange natural formations between Cúcuta and Ocaña, the wind-time has petrified figures, castles and citadels similar to ancient civilizations. Symbols multiply in this intense poem. The poet confronts the tragic fate of man. The ritornello is that of time. Thus, Cote Lamus reaches his highest poetic expression, and the most cosmic vision of death.” Bibliography

Poetry

Preparación para la muerte, Imprenta Departamental, Cúcuta, 1950
Salvación del recuerdo, José Janés, Barcelona, 1953
Los sueños, Ínsula, Madrid, 1956
La vida cotidiana, Ediciones Mito, Colección El Delfín, Bogotá, 1959
Estoraques, Ministerio de Educación Nacional, Bogotá, 1963
Obra literaria (Literary works), Biblioteca Básica Colombiana, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, Bogotá, 1976
Obra completa (Complete Works), Ediciones Casa Silva, Bogotá, 2005


Links (in Spanish)

An article about Eduardo Cote Lamus on Vanguardia.com
Poems by Eduardo Cote Lamus on Foro de Literatura