Animals indistinct, animals mute (Natural motifs in Ivan Štrpka’s poetry)

Abstract

Drawing on ecocritical approaches, the article tackles natural motifs (especially animals) and pantheistic elements in the poetry of Ivan Štrpka (b. 1944). Methodologically, the authors draw on ecocritical approaches. With regards to Štrpka’s early collections, they look at the way the poet employed the figure of the parrot in his critique of rhetorical emptiness of the socialist society. In the poetry published in the 1980s, on the other hand, it pertains that Štrpka used natural and animal motifs to portray erotic relationships and urban atmosphere. From his later poetry, the article focuses on the poems that demonstrate the poet’s pantheistic worldview and shows that Štrpka’s writing also offers fruitful ground for ecocritical reading. The last section of the paper looks at the collections Štrpka published after 1997. Nature is most often tied with civilizational contexts and dark, enigmatic, and sombre tones anticipating a catastrophic vision of the world prevail in these late poems. The article is thus both a contribution to the understanding of the development of the poet’s oeuvre and to the ways in which Slovak literature represents and constructs the animal and nature.

Keywords

• twentieth century slovak poetry
• ivan štrpka
• natural motifs
• animal in literature
• ecocriticism
• pantheism
• animal studies