ABSTRACT
María Zambrano, an exceptional Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century, was a philosopher of the poetic; that is to say, her use of the word was intensely lyrical, and fraught with the ambiguous and polysemical nature of poetry. Enrique de Rivas describes Zambrano’s innate poetic self: “[P]odrían imaginar que su modo de expresarse simbólica y metafóricamente era producto de una voluntad profesional, de un ejercicio intencional del losofar. Pero tengo para mí que era todo lo contrario; era el resultado de una manera de estar en las cosas, que no era losofar, sino poetizar” (n.p.) [You could imagine that her way of expressing herself symbolically and metaphorically was a product of a professional choice, of an intentional exercise of philosophizing. But I believe it was exactly the opposite; her style was the result of a way of being in things that was not philosophizing, but rather poeticizing].1 In addition and not surprisingly, Zambrano’s practice of the then nascent art of literary criticism reveals her profound sensibility to the power of literature as philosophical treatise.2 Her ability to demonstrate Spain’s idiosyncrasies through weaving archetypical literary gures and tropes into intrahistorical interpretations is one of her greatest talents.3
