The poetry of Edwin Madrid: a pragmatic look at his work the novel of my poetry

Abstract

This article analyzes the most recent narrative work by Ecuadorian poet and writer Edwin Madrid (1961), who in 2022 published La novela de mi poesía with La Castalia Press, marking a significant shift as he ventures into narrative prose without abandoning his lyrical essence. The main objective of this study is to propose a renewed methodological approach to the analysis of contemporary Ecuadorian poetry by applying, for the first time, the principles of Pragmatics and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1986/1994), using the 2004 edition as the conceptual basis for its application to a local literary corpus. To this end, we employ inferential analysis on 45 poems or fragments organized into three main thematic axes: death and mourning, childhood and memory, and poetry as refuge and resistance. Our findings show that, in Madrid’s work, death does not appear as an endpoint but as a profound and personal presence revealed through metaphors, silences, and subtle suggestions, inviting the reader to take an active role in meaning-construction. Furthermore, we argue that this approach demonstrates how the author’s apparent linguistic simplicity conceals a sophisticated cognitive architecture capable of generating what the theory identifies as high-intensity “positive cognitive effects.” Finally, we observe that Madrid’s poetry—anchored in a Quito spanning from the 1960s to the pandemic—not only dialogues with an Ecuadorian literary tradition that has historically associated death with social injustice, but also resignifies it by internalizing this universal theme and offering a powerful tool for understanding, through intimate experience, how we process pain, memory, and resilience.