Latin American Poetry

From Encounter to the Colonial Era

The panorama of Latin American poetry spans five hundred years, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The first “Renaissance” in the New World (1492-1556) was the era of discovery, exploration, conquest, and colonization under the reign of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela and later Carlos V. The origins of Latin American literature are found in the chronicles of these events, narrated by Spanish soldiers or missionaries. The era of colonization during the reign of Philip II (1556-1598) was a second Renaissance and the period of the Counter-Reformation. During this time, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1594) wrote the first epic poem, La Araucana (1569-1589). The native saga narrated the wars between the Spanish conquistadors and the Araucano Indians of Chile. This is the first truly poetic literary work with an American theme.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

During the period of the Austrian Habsburg kings (1598-1701), this Renaissance was gradually replaced by the Baroque era. While the Golden Age of Spanish letters was declining in the Old World, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) reigned supreme as the queen of colonial letters. She was the major poet during the colonial era. The autodidactic nun, who wrote plays and prose as well as poetry, was known as the tenth muse, la décima musa. Her poetic masterpiece, the autobiographical “Primero sueño,” combines Baroque elements with a mastery of Spanish and classical languages and her unique style. Her shorter poems, with their lyrical verse phrasing and native themes, capture popular Mexican culture. Some of her most famous sonnets are “Este que ves, engaño colorido” (what you see [is] dark deception), “¨En perseguirme, mundo, qué interesas?” (in pursuing me, world, what interests you?), “Détente, sombra de mi bien esquivo” (stop, shadow of my elusive love), and “Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba” (this afternoon, love, when I spoke to you). Her most recognized redondillas (or “roundelays,” stanzas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming abba) are “Este amoroso tormento” (this tormented love) and “Hombres necios” (“Foolish Men”). Her charm and brilliance won her many wealthy and royal patrons. While she initially accepted their admiration, she died a recluse after rejecting her literary career and denouncing her precocious fame and vain pursuits.

Neoclassicism

During the Wars of Independence (1808-1826), Neoclassicism and other French influences dominated literary production. Andrés Bello (1781-1865) is better known for his prose, but he was also a prolific verse writer who followed the European neoclassical movement. He wrote the poems “Alocución a la poesía” and “La agricultura en la zona tórida” with American themes and European style. José Maria Heredia (1803-1839) was a Cuban exiled in Mexico and the United States who wrote about the beauty of the countries that adopted him. Romanticism characterized his poems about Niagara Falls, “Niágara,” Aztec ruins, “En el Teocalli de Cholula,” and other wonders such as a storm in “En una tempestad.” His ode “Himno a un desterrado” relates his experience as an exile in adopted nations.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) left Cuba to write in Spain because of the greater freedom she could enjoy there as a female poet. Romanticism influenced her poems about love, God, and her homeland, such as “Noche de insomnio y el alba” (night of insomnia and dawn), “Al partir” (upon leaving), and “Amor y orgullo” (love and pride).

José Hernández (1834-1886) wrote about the Argentinean gauchos in El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872; The Gaucho Martin Fierro, 1935) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879; The Return of Martin Fierro, 1935; included in The Gaucho Martin Fierro, 1935). His Romantic verses followed the structures and lyrical rhythms of popular songs that romanticized the gauchos as a dying breed in the wake of industrialization.

Modernismo

By 1875, the roots of a poetic movement had grown into a new poetic era. The Latin American Modernistas were innovators and critics of the conservative thematic and stylistic structures that persisted from the colonial period. In Latin American society, global industrialization, capitalism, North American cultural and economic imperialism, and Spain’s loss of all its colonies had a significant impact on artistic development.

A definitive moment in the progress of the movement resulted from José Martí’s publication of Ismaelillo in 1882. The poet and hero, who died fighting for Cuban independence (1853-1895), published Versos libres that same year, a collection that followed Versos sencillos, published in 1881. All three collections characterized the existential angst of the era as they experimented with new lyrical forms and themes. Martí approached language as a sculptor approaches clay and molded words into new forms. His innovations have allowed him to be considered the first great visionary Latin American poet as he sought to define Nuestra América, a Latin American identity struggling for artistic as well as political and economic independence. Throughout the movement, the anguish, emptiness, and uncertainty of modernity provided a unifying thread for poets seeking innovation.

The Mexican modernist Manuel Gutierrez Nájera (1859-1895) was a journalist renowned for his prose writings in his own time. He founded La Revista Azul, a literary review that promotedModernismo throughout Latin America. His contemporary Rubén Darío (1867-1916), however, defined the Modernista poetic. Darío’s poetry was a reaction to the decadence of Romanticism in which he sought a unique voice while reinvigorating the Spanish language. He led a movement that borrowed themes popularized by the European Romantics and stylistic models of the French Parnassian movement. Darío not only was an instigator and initiator of the vindication of his language, but also served as a bridge to the second stage of Modernismo. His Azul (1888; blue) and Cantos de vida y esperanza, Los cisnes, y otros poemas (1905; songs of life and hope, the swans, and other poems) represent Darío’s dynamic style, respect for beauty, search for harmonious words, and celebration of pleasure. Despite the Decadence of his later poetry collections, Darío maintained confidence in the saving power of art and its use to protest against social and historical injustices and resolve existential enigmas. The Modernistas defended humanism in the face of economic progress and international imperialism, which devaluated art. They elevated art as an end in itself.

Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938) was the major Argentinean Modernista poet. His poems “Delectación morosa,” “Emoción aldeana,” and “Divagación lunar” lament ephemeral beauty captured and immortalized by perfectly placed words. Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) was influenced by postmodernist tendencies. Her intense verse experimented with Symbolism and other twentieth century innovations. Her vivid sensual poems include “Tú me quieres blanca,” “Epitafio para mi tumba,” “Voy a dormir,” “Hombre pequeñito,” and “Fiera de amor.” The Uruguayan Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) wrote intensely emotional and erotic poems that highlighted the dualities of human nature. Pleasure and pain, good and evil, love and death create and maintain verbal tension. These opposites struggle for dominance in poems such as “La musa,” “Explosión,” and “El vampiro.”

These individual elements come together in these poets’ faith in the artistic power of the word. This autonomous aesthetic power opposed the fin de siglo (turn of the century) angst resulting from industrialism, positivism, and competing ideologies. While reflecting on their predecessors, the Modernistas created original verse with unique usage of sometimes archaic or exotic words. The language was sometimes luxurious and sensual, adapting classical and Baroque usage, from elements of the Parnassians to those of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Art Nouveau and European Symbolist movements and tendencies of decadent Romanticism. The symbolic impact of words characterized the movement as a whole. This all-encompassing factor defines the movement and its existential nature. This poetry is the living expression of an era of spiritual crises, personal and societal anguish, and uncertainty about the future of art as well as humanity’s direction as it embarked upon the twentieth century.

Postmodernism and the Vanguard

No exact date marks the transition from Latin American modernism topostmodernism or to a vanguard movement. A combination of historical and societal factors influenced the artistic development of individual Latin American countries. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, World War I and the Mexican Revolution interrupted artistic and literary exchange between the Old World models and the New World innovators. The urban bourgeoisie, who were patrons of the arts, were displaced. The United States had gradually replaced the European masters in science and industry as well as politics, and its dominance permeated all levels of Latin American society.

Altazor (wr. 1919, pb. 1931), by Chilean Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), marks a break with the past. Huidobro originated stylistic practices never seen before in Latin American poetry. Increacionismo, his personal version of creationism, he sought to create a poem the way nature made a tree. His words, invested with autonomous linguistic and symbolic significance, reinvent themselves by creating a world apart from other words. They are antilyrical, intellectual, and disconnected from emotional and spiritual experience. Nevertheless, Huidobro’s world, created by his unique use of words, was a human creation because in it the poet experiences alienation and existential angst. Huidobro’s poems “Arte poética,” “Depart,” and “Marino” voice his despair in isolation.

Huidobro had a significant influence on younger poets, particularly in his development of a school of thought that centered on the theory of Ultraísmo, which attempted to construct alternative linguistic choices to those offered by the external world. Ultraísmo synthesized Latin American with Spanish and European tendencies.

Among those influenced by Ultraísmo were Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and in fact, Borges became its main proponent. While his short stories have repeatedly caused him to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, his poetry reveals a linguistic expertise and lyrical genius unparalleled by his contemporaries. He believed that lyricism and metaphysics united to justify the means of the poetic process. This fusion provides the genesis of his most representative poems, “Everything and Nothing,” “Everness,” “Laberinto,” “Dreamtigers,” and “Borges y yo.”

The Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) developed a unique and distinctive poetic voice. His Los heraldos negros (1918; The Black Heralds, 1990), Trilce (1922; English translation, 1973), and Poemas humanos (1939; Human Poems, 1968) demonstrate the impossibility of mutual communication and comprehension, the absurdity of the human condition, and the inevitability of death.

In 1945, Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her verses echo the folksongs and traditional ballads of her native Chile, the Caribbean, and Mexico. They naturally blend native dialects with Castilian in a lyrical fusion. Some of her best poems include “Sonetos a la muerte,” “Todos íbamos a ser reinas,” “Pan,” and “Cosas.”

Mistral’s countryman Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) also won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1971. During his formative years he was influenced by Modernismo, experimenting with various styles while serving as an international diplomat. The last stage of his poetry was marked by didacticism and political themes, and he was exiled for his activity in the Communist Party. Neruda sought to create a forum for “impure” poetry that encompassed all experience. His Canto general (1950; partial translation in Let the Rail Splitter Awake, and Other Poems, 1951; full translation as Canto General, 1991) voiced his solidarity with humanity in his political and poetic conversion. Odas elementales (1954; The Elemental Odes, 1961) continued his mission of solidarity with the humblest members of creation. Other landmark collections include Los versos del capitán (1952; The Captain’s Verses, 1972) and Cien sonetos de amor (1959; One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1986). Neruda believed that America and clarity should be one and the same.

The Mexican literary generation known as the Taller was led by Octavio Paz (1914-1998). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 for his brilliant prose and poetry that defined the Mexican culture and connected its isolation and universality to other cultures. His landmark analysis of poetic theory is proposed in El arco y la lira (1956; The Bow and the Lyre, 1973). The poetic evolution of linguistic progression considered “signs in rotation” culminated in Piedra de sol (1957; Sun Stone, 1963) and synthesized all twentieth century poetic theories into a highly original yet distinctly Mexican work. Representative poems include “Himno entre ruinas,” “Viento entero,” and “La poesía.”

The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (1914-2018) developed a unique yet popular style. He called his poems antipoemas for their super-realism, sarcasm, self-criticism, and humor. Parra’s poetry speaks to the masses and rejects pretension, as the poet revitalizes language and innovates with words in action. His masterwork, Poemas y antipoemas (1954; Poems and Antipoems, 1967), epitomizes antirhetorical and antimetaphorical free verse. “Soliloquio del individuo” and “Recuerdos de juventud” are representative.

The work of Sara de Ibañez (1910-1981) represents the antithesis of fellow Uruguayan Agustini. Her intellectual and metaphysical themes and neoclassical style allude to the poetry of Sor Juana and Golden Age masters such as Spain’s Luis de Góngora y Argote. Love and death are analyzed in “Isla en la tierra,” “Isla en la luz,” “Liras,” and “Soliloquios del Soldado.”

The “impure” poetry of Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020) unites political ugliness and the beauty of the imagination. It is characterized by exteriorismo, a technique that incorporates propaganda, sound bites, advertisements, and fragments of popular culture into poetry that seeks to convert and enlighten. The aesthetic value of these poems is not overshadowed by their political and spiritual message. Representative collections include La hora O (1960), Salmos (1967; The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, 1971), Oración por Marilyn Monroe, y otros poemas (1965; Marilyn Monroe, and Other Poems, 1975), and Cántico cósmico (1989; The Music of the Spheres, 1990; also known as Cosmic Canticle).

Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) is best known for her novels and essays about social injustice in her native Chiapas. Because she focused on the status of women within the Mayan culture and within Mexican society as a whole, she was considered a feminist. Her poetry and prose are concerned with the human condition, not only with the plight of women. Her most representative poems are “Autorretrato,” “Entrevista de Prensa,” and “Se habla de Gabriel.”

Thematically and stylistically more militant and radical, Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) writes overtly feminist poetry using elements of symbolism and irony. Her poems include “Pretalamio,” “Negativo,” “La prisionera,” and “Epitalamio.” As editor of a literary journal, Ferré introduced feminist criticism to Latin American literature.

Movements on a smaller national scale characterize present-day poetry. They are characterized by experimental and politically and socially conscious efforts. The twenty-first century heralds the work of los nuevos, the new poets whose work is linked to national as well as international issues.

Individual postvanguard poets do not identify with particular ideologies. The poetry of Argentineans Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) and Juan Gelman (1930-2014) deals with personal exile as well as the universal experience of exile. Since the 1980s, women have emerged with empowered poetry that serves as liberation from oppression. Poets including Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), Rosario Murillo (b. 1951), Gioconda Belli (b. 1948), Claribel Alegría (1924-2018), Juana de Ibarbourou (1895-1979), and Ana Istarú (b. 1960) have given voice to the silent struggles of women striving to realize their potential in a male-dominated society.

Poetry written since the 1980s has focused on oppression and exile. The focus on the withdrawal from history as a condition for the poetry of Paz has shifted to the poet belonging in the historical moment so that poetry has a public place and common concern. Contemporary Latin American poetry has become the process of naming the word and rewriting history in a lived world. The making of that world is the creative act that celebrates the word.

Among the notable twenty-first-century Latin American poets is the highly awarded Ada Limón (b. 1976). Her Bright Dead Things (2015) was nominated for several awards, and The Carrying (2018) and The Hurting Kind (2022) won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, respectively. Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954) and Elizabeth Acevedo (b. 1988) also contributed important works in the early twenty-first century. These modern writers address their heritage and its influence on American literature and art.

Bibliography

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Castro-Klarén, Sara, ed. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. John Wiley & Sons, 2022.

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