This chapter is devoted to the long poem which, after failed attempts to create an epic of the new nation, was reconceived in the twentieth century in the lyrical vein and remains a crucial consecratory instance in the Mexican canon. The chapter examines the nature and weight of the long poem’s trajectory, including the Contemporáneo José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939), work by Octavio Paz, and Sara Uribe’s Antigona González (2012). The discussion also considers the new forms of the long poem, such as those by David Huerta, Maricela Guerrero, Isabel Zapata, Balam Rodrigo, Ricardo Cázares, and others.

This chapter focuses on Roberto Bolaño poetical imagination; not only his poetry, but the way he uses poetry and the poet, as a literary figure, to stage an ironic and parodic representation of literature in the context of ongoing globalization. My main contention is that the exilic condition of Bolaño’s life and works defines his relationship to Latin American literature at large; thus, far from repeating conventional investments in literature’s potential to express Latin American singularity and to, somehow, supplement the historical process as a process leading to final liberation, what predominates in his works, and particularly in his decisive novel The Savage Detectives, is a skeptical understanding of the final disarticulation between literature and history. His characters, in other words, far from the mythical investment of Latin American romantic and revolutionary-like characters of the past, are defined by a nomadic and uncertain way of living detached from the age of commitment and political programs.

Mary Tighe’s long Spenserian allegorical romance, Psyche (1805), is one of the major poems by an Irish woman of the early nineteenth century. Shaped by the zealous Methodism of her childhood, Tighe reacted with anguish to the political violence of 1798, offering the reconciling balms of sentiment to the open wounds of sectarian conflict. In Psyche, a mother and a young woman vie for the affections of a son, displacing national struggle into a realm of emotional psychodrama. Connecting with nature, a rejected woman rediscovers the force of attachment and belonging, even as the text accommodates (via Apuleius) a good deal of sexual errancy and threats to feminine decorum. In its drama of female audacity, transgression and outcast heroism, the poem shows Miltonic ambitions, seeding a template much emulated by Tighe’s fellow poets of the nineteenth century and beyond.