My sense of "duende"--and it's is not a quality I can claim, so I don't really know this--is a kind of deep desperation, a raw sensibility to experience that goes deeper than the personal and into the universal, under language. I agree that it's not just Spanish, but can turn up in work from anywhere. I'm aware of it in some poems by Emily Dickinson as the quality that fractures their syntax and produces her characteristic strange, riveting imagery. But it's not the same as surrealism: it's more seriously meant, and has a greater capacity to hurt and remain in the memory.
It's not that it opposes intellect, but that it subverts intellect, threatens it with its own weapons.
For instance, Dickinson's cry to God--"Burglar! Banker! Father!/I am poor once more." That's not just incongruous and frightening in its vehemence and its leap from one association to another, it's also a recognizably human response to what we understand although we may not be able to word it. Her "duende" consists of her rapid and fearless vision, and the force with which she then finds equally fearless words for it.
The "possession" element is inescapable. People talk like that when they are "not thinking clearly," to put it euphemistically. But they're feeling clearly, and they have the nerve to say it, before "the pale cast of thought" does any editing.
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