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22147 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 315 of 1108

  • 4 - Conversational Poetry

  • from Part I - History
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 63-79

  • Summary

    This essay traces the trajectory plotted by conversational poetry in Latin America from, roughly, the 1930s until, roughly, the 1970s. It was a time of the Twilight of the Idols, a Post-Vanguard when the poet turned away from rhymed verse, metaphors and the book, towards the rhythms of everyday speech, the charm of common words and the scenes of the quotidian world. One of the major figures behind this trend was the U.S. poet, William Carlos Williams, who wanted to get back to “words washed clean.” The Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) is identified as an innovator of this trend in Latin America’s poetry circles; as he advised young poets: “Don’t waste your time lying.” The essay concludes with the discussion of the role played by the conversational mode and the happenings of everyday life in the poetry of the Cuban, Roberto Fernández Retamar (b. 1930), the Uruguayan, Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), the Mexican, Jaime Sabines (1926-1999), the Nicaraguan, Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925), the Salvadorean, Roque Dalton (1935-1975), and the Chilean, Nicanor Parra (b. 1914).

  • 9 - Pablo Neruda

  • from Part II - Six Key Figures
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 140-151

  • Summary

    This chapter offers a survey of Pablo Neruda’s most important poetic works, beginning with his melancholy-drenched Crepusculario and the work that made his famous, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, which express the post-adolescent longing for fulfilling love. A new phase was reached with the publication of Residencia en la tierra, inspired by Neruda’s rather negative experience of life as a diplomat in Rangoon. This essay argues that it was Neruda’s intense friendship with the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, that pulled him out of his “disgust with existence”; and it was Lorca’s murder in August 1936 in the opening months of the Spanish Civil War that provoked a dramatic transformation in Neruda’s work – he began to see poems as social and political weapons. His political phase – epitomized by Canto general – was followed by four volumes of odes in which Neruda wrote poems in which he sought to make the ordinary appear extraordinary, many of which are exquisite gems.

  • 16 - U.S. Latino/a Poetry

  • from Part III - Diversity and Heterogeneity
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 245-260

  • Summary

    This chapter maps a literary history of U.S. Latino/a poetry, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Examining how Latino poets have adopted Latin American symbols and traditions, the chapter argues that understanding Latino poetry requires knowledge of Latin American poetries and histories. To catalogue Latino poetry’s range of forms and practices, the chapter offers a hemispheric lens that foregrounds historical relations and migratory routes between north and south. After defining Latino poetry’s multiple genealogies and languages, the chapter discusses the development of Chicano (Mexican-American) and Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) poetries during the “movement” era (mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies). Then it sketches the parameters of the “post-movement” era (Eighties and Nineties), when Latino poetry expanded, often via feminist and queer paradigms, to address conflicts in Central America and cultures of the U.S-Mexico border. The chapter ends by outlining the aesthetic range of contemporary Latino poetry, with micro-sketches of poets whose hemispheric literary practices include poetry, translation, criticism, teaching, and editing. The chapter discusses major figures such as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Pedro Pietri, Juan Felipe Herrera, Martín Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Gloria Anzaldúa, and emerging major figures including Urayoán Noel, Daniel Borzutzky, and Carmen Giménez Smith.

  • 7 - Gabriela Mistral

  • from Part II - Six Key Figures
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 113-124

  • Summary

    This chapter goes beyond the two facts for which the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, is most well known (she was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1945) and she wrote maternal verses but had no natural children of her own) and analyses the various stages of her poetic career from her early verses that established her as the perfect modernista poetess of the turn of the twentieth century to her later works such as “Poema de Chile” in which she explored the fantastic landscape of her native Chile, accompanied by her imaginary son. This essay provides a new reading based on Mistral’s manuscripts which have only become publicly available since 2007.

  • 10 - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

  • from Part II - Six Key Figures
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 152-162

  • Summary

    Nearly unanimously considered Brazil’s greatest poet, Drummond (1902-87) left a vast poetical oeuvre (some two dozen books) of considerable thematic and stylistic variety, demonstrating longevity, versatility, and diversified aesthetic charm. He appealed to connoisseurs of belles-lettres and the broader reading public alike. In the pantheon of Western poetry, Drummond merits a place alongside the greatest poets of Portugal—the giant Luiz de Camões (d. 1580) and the modernist Fernando Pessoa (d. 1935)—as well as the most highly regarded Spanish American poets. His signature composition “Poem of Seven Faces” (1930) is a springboard to discuss structural and thematic aspects of his poetry over the years and to organize poems heptagonally. Translations of his work can be distributed in seven groupings. One can identify seven concentric domains of poetic space in his verse. Lyric selves embody seven fundamental voices (personae) who emerge and evolve. Drummond’s own self-presentation organizes his work as concerning the individual, the homeland, the family, friends, social impact, knowledge of love, lyric itself, playful exercises, and contemplation of existence. His poetry can be clear and seemingly conventional, or dense and abstract, even anti-normative.

  • 3 - The Avant-Garde: From Creacionismo to Ultraísmo, Brazilian Modernismo, Antropofagia, and Surrealism

  • from Part I - History
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 36-62

  • Summary

    This study examines the powerful reinvention of language by Latin American poets associated with the avant-garde. It focuses on paradigmatic ideas such as creacionismo, ultraísmo, Brazilian Modernismo, surrealism, and the Semana de Arte Moderna through a selection of seminal writers. The essay questions an established view about the legacy of Latin American avant-garde poetry: that it has always been dependent on European concepts. Against this traditional standpoint, my investigation highlights the vanguard writers’ taste for materiality, sensation, the “primitive,” and will to reinvent language (including new, multidisciplinary forms of linguistic codification) as sites of critique with respect to Eurocentrism and substantialist accounts of poetry based on a metaphysics of presence. At stake in this questioning is a new conceptualization of Latin American experimental form. Never the result of blind imitation, the Latin American avant-garde’s dialogue with the currents of European modernism—such as Dada, surrealism, cubism or futurism—was framed by dissonance, simultaneity, and the reinvention of language. The essay illustrates how Latin American vanguard poets demonstrated a passion to attain a complex, intensive and anti-representational medium whose purpose was to surpass the limitations of conventional poetry and lay bear a “real” commensurate with the experience of the times.

  • 5 - Contemporary Poetry

  • from Part I - History
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 80-96

  • Summary

    This chapter provides a sketch of some recent general poetic trends and more detailed observations about a small selection of poets who might be said to represent and at times surpass these tendencies. Perhaps the most important movement or trend in Latin American poetry in the last thirty years is the neobarroco or neobaroque. If the committed poetry of the 1960s and 70s focussed on the message, for example the denunciation of social injustice, neobarroco poetry turned to the medium, namely the experience of language itself. Objetivismo, in contrast, concentrates on the creation of objects in language, and reacted to excess and sensuality with poetry that was stripped of all adornment, including metaphors and even adjectives or adverbs. The work of very recent writers – the so-called “New Lyric” – gives an impression of ambition and skill with which young poets are addressing the page and the reader today. Despite widespread claims of poetry’s irrelevance, anachronism, or wilful isolation, it continues to be relevant for authors, readers, and publishers. New technologies and media have not rung the knell for writing verse, but instead provide some of the liveliest spaces for the circulation and even composition of new poems.

  • 6 - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  • from Part II - Six Key Figures
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 99-112

  • Summary

    This essay analyses the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) in terms of its disruption of the colonial and patriarchal structures of the society of New Spain (as Mexico was then known) in which she lived. It begins with an analysis of her Reply to Sister Philotea (dated March 1, 1691) in which she alludes to her love of learning as well as her rejection of the notion that women have less right to knowledge than men, passes to a discussion of her famous “Philosophical Satire” in which she berated sexual injustice: “You foolish and unreasoning men/ who cast all blame on women,/ not seeing you yourselves are causes/ of the same fault you accuse.” The issue of the connection between Sor Juana’s poems which owe their very existence to the patronage system in which she operated (a poem celebrating the Viceroy of Mexico’s birthday, that of his wife, as well as the baptism of their son) and her so-called “personal lyrics” is discussed. The compositional rhetoric of the poems that have endeared Sor Juana to later (often feminist) audiences – sonnets such as “This afternoon when I spake with thee beloved…” and “Tarry, shadow of my scornful treasure…”) – is analysed in terms of the reality-appearance trope which underpinned so much Renaissance literature. The essay concludes with an analysis of her long poem, First Dream, and her verse plays such as Divine Narcissus.

  • 11 - Octavio Paz

  • from Part II - Six Key Figures
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 163-172

  • Summary

    This chapter studies the life and work of the Mexican poet and intellectual, Octavio Paz (1914-1986), who dominated Latin American intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. He rewrote the Mexican poetic tradition along avant-garde lines, setting up Ramón López Velarde and José Juan Tablada as founders. He became leader of a group of Mexican and Latin American poets, who shared his vision of poetry. He edited prestigious magazines that include Plural (1971-76) and Vuelta (1976-98). He won just about every literary prize from the Cervantes in 1981 to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. This essay explores the reasons why he rose so high and also asks whether, with his passing, this high reputation will survive.

  • 17 - (New) Media Poetry

  • from Part III - Diversity and Heterogeneity
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 261-281

  • Summary

    Avant-garde poetry – in Latin America as elsewhere – has always responded vigorously to the challenges offered by technological change, and this continues to be true in relation to the advent of digital technologies and new media applications. This chapter first explores key questions of definition, terminology, and recurrent themes such as the critique of mass media and the exploration of posthumanist themes. It moves on to examine the relationship of this type of poetry to its literary antecedents, both in Latin America and globally, as well as flagging up the first exponents of this kind of poetry in the 1960s such as Argentinian Omar Gancedo. It then explores in more detail examples of some of the most common forms of (new) media poetry: digitally influenced but still printable poetry, including code poetry; visual and kinetic poetry; digital multimedia poetry; interactive and hypertext poetry; generative poetry; and digital sound and performance poetry. Specific attention is devoted to poets/artists such as Ana María Uribe (Argentina), Belén Gache (Argentina/Spain), Wilton Luiz de Azevedo (Brazil), Eduardo Navas (El Salvador/USA) and Gustavo Romano (Argentina/Spain).

  • 1 - Colonial Poetry

  • from Part I - History
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 3-17

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the rise of colonial poetry between the 16th and 18th centuries. The way in which Spain and Portugal approached the colonization of the New World had a deep impact on the development of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil. Key to this process was the early establishment of the printing press and universities in Mexico City and Lima, which allowed for the growth of a local literary identity revolving around a sophisticated lettered community. This is the same that partly assimilated and partly obliterated indigenous cultures and traditions, though people such as Bernardino de Sahagún and the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega contributed significantly to its preservation. European literary trends reached the New World and established themselves in the sixteenth century, which saw the development of epic and religious poetry. Both played a crucial role enforcing imperialism and evangelization, though texts such as Ercilla’s La Araucana presented also the ambiguities of colonial discourse and the devastating effects of war. Other genres such as Petrarchism and satire allowed for further transatlantic dialogues strengthening the literary culture of the New World. Poetry thus played a key role in political and aesthetic discussions that shaped Latin American identity.

  • 12 - Women’s Poetry

  • from Part III - Diversity and Heterogeneity
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 175-193

  • Summary

    This essay compares the poetics of two canonical Latin American writers. Both enjoyed fame and consecration during their lifetime in their respective countries. Lisboa in Brazil and Pizarnik in Argentina, authored thin and unforgettable volumes of poetry. Both came from loving families and enjoyed iconic status in literary circles and yet, Lisboa constructed a poetics of joy, pride and beauty to be found in all things Brazilian as well as the phenomena touched by the self conceived as light and love; while Pizarnik's brave an incisive struggle with language and the self produced one cutting and bleeding revelation after another at the expense of self, consciousness and self-love. Both poets sought to live in the house of language. But while Lisboa worked to build her dwelling place, Pizarnik could not but seek to build by paradoxically dismantling the architecture of language. Close readings of key poems sustain the study of the poetics of each poet.

  • 18 - English Translations

  • from Part III - Diversity and Heterogeneity
  • Edited by Stephen M. Hart, University College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
    Published online:
    09 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 282-288

  • Summary

    This chapter offers a brief survey of the main anthologies of Spanish-American poetry published in English translation from the late nineteen-forties to the early sixties. It succinctly traces the change in translation approaches during this period, from an initial emphasis on literal translations to the more personal approaches taken by American poets, who aimed at a recreation of the source poem and who went on to fully integrate translation into their own poetics. The survey further highlights the attention which Anglophone translators have given to the work of three Latin American poets in particular—César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz—and some of the qualities that became associated with their work, such as irrationality and a tendency toward political commitment. The chapter concludes with a final survey of the main publishers who are currently editing Spanish-American poetry in the Anglophone world and some reference is made to the difficulty of moving beyond the names of Vallejo, Neruda, and Paz.

Page 315 of 1108