Surface and depth: Iconic flows in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s poetry

Abstract

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived between 1825 and 1898, in Zurich, Switzerland. Along with Gottfried Keller and Jeremias Gotthelf, he is one of the most important voices in 19th century Swiss literature. With a wide literary production, the author wrote novels, novellas and poems. This article focuses on his poetic work, analyzing two poems in which images stand out as a fundamental principle in the organization of their flow of meaning. Images represent a way of mediating, but also of apprehending reality, building with words an inseparable pair in epistemological practice. In this context, the concept of iconic consciousness seeks to explain how images have an impact on the formation of other forms of knowledge, besides linguistic representation. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poetry reveals a similar desire by thinking about how images have their own dynamics in the poetic text. Thus, with a focus on the flows between surface and depth, this article wishes to discuss the poems "Im Spätbot" and "Auf dem Canale Grande", in order to analyze the relationship between images and words as iconic flows, in these poems. The discussion of the two poems aims to verify how visual and verbal representations come together, in order to reveal dimensions of meaning that remain in a flow between surface and depth.