The Intimate Journey in Search of the Sacred

The Renewal of the Universe in Las cábalas del sueño by Olga Acevedo

Abstract

Within the literary project of the Chilean poet Olga Acevedo, Las cábalas del sueño, the seventh collection of poems originally published in 1951 and republished in 2019, shows a poetic-philosophical itinerary in gradual transition from individual unity to spiritual totality, including, in this journey, sufferings and intimate longings born from an intense process of self-reflection and initiation. In this article we will posit that, through this poetic proposal, the author opens an innovative route in the Chilean imaginaries of the first half of the 20th century, creating a poetic cartography centered around female spiritual evolution. We will attend to this phenomenon through an analysis focused on the female experience of Campbell’s “mythic journey”, conceptualizing it as a strategy to frame the exploration of the subjectivity of the lyrical speaker. In order to do this, the analysis will be structured in four stages, or phases, through which the poetic transit is carried out in order to elucidate the transformations that the speaker undergoes on her way to accomplish an intimate experience linked to the sacred and to the potential encounter with divinity, the ultimate goal of the Acevedian poetic project.