Death and the “I”: poetry and other arts in the later Herberto Helder

Abstract

The last books by Herberto Helder have significant inflections in relation to his whole work. The core of these changes is the renewal of the forms of an always central notion to the poet’s writing: the one of death. The later Herberto Helder opens itself to the coexistence of different ideas of death, to which correspond different regimes of poetry. In this sense, the interaction between different regimes of death affects, on the one hand, the regime of authorship, the conceptions of the “I” and the reading pact proposed by the poem, and, on the other hand, the relations that the writing keeps with two notions that structure it: the ones of time and image. The concept of “late style”, developed by Theodor Adorno and then by Edward Said, offers itself as a tool of analysis of the links between death, time and image in the final moments of Herberto Helder’s poetry. The relations that it establishes or allows to establish with music, cinema and photography are the point of departure to its questioning.