OCTAVIO PAZ.
The Siren & the Seash.e.l.l.
AND OTHER ESSAYS ON POETS AND POETRY.
Editor"s Note.
Between 1957 and 1965 Octavio Paz published three collections of essays, articles, and reviews, mainly on poets and poetry, that had appeared in journals and elsewhere. Shortly before and after those dates he published two editions of a book of sustained reflections on the poetic phenomenon, El arco y la lira (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1956; revised and enlarged edition, 1967). The second edition of that book has been published in English, in the translation of Ruth L. C. Simms, as The Bow and the Lyre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). The Siren and the Seash.e.l.l, which is made up of selections from those three collections, is intended as a companion volume to The Bow and the Lyre. It contains ten essays in which Paz turned his attention to individual poets, followed by two others of a more general nature.
In the first section, the poets under discussion are Latin American, all but Ruben Daro Mexican; the essays are arranged chronologically according to the birth dates of the poets. In the second section, the poets are from other parts: two from the United States, one from France, and two from Spain. In the third section, the two essays are in order of composition. One of these, "Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion," written in 1942, was the seed that grew to be The Bow and the Lyre, which, Paz has said, in his foreword to the first edition, "is merely the maturing, the development, and, here and there, the correction of that distant text." For the reader who wishes to read all the essays in the order in which they were written, the place of composition and date are given in brackets under each t.i.tle.
The essays on Daro and Lpez Velarde are from Cuadrivio [Quadrivium] (Mexico City: Editorial Joaqun Mortiz, 1965); those on Sor Juana, Tablada, Frost, and Machado, and "Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion," are from Las peras del olmo [Pears from the elm tree] (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mexico, 1957); the rest are from Puertas al campo [Doors to outside] (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mexico, 1966). "A Literature of Foundations" was published in translation in TriQuarterly 1314 (Fall-Winter 19681969). A much abbreviated version of the essay on Daro was published as a prologue in Selected Poems of Ruben Daro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).
The selection and arrangement of the essays in this volume were made with the a.s.sistance and approval of the author.
L.K.
I.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
Ruben Daro.
Jose Juan Tablada
Ramn Lpez Velarde
Alfonso Reyes
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
[PARIS, 1950].
In 1690, Manuel Fernndez de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, published Sor Juana Ines"s criticism of the Jesuit Antonio de Vieyra"s famous sermon, "Christ"s Proofs of Love for Man." This Carta atenagrica [Letter worthy of Athena] is Sor Juana"s only theological composition, or at least the only one that has survived.
Taken up at a friend"s behest and written "with more repugnance than any other feeling, as much because it treats sacred things, for which I have reverent terror, as because it seems to wish to impugn, for which I have a natural aversion," the Carta had immediate repercussions. It was most unusual that a Mexican nun should dare to criticize, with as much rigor as intellectual boldness, the celebrated confessor of Christina of Sweden. But, if her criticism of Vieyra produced astonishment, her singular opinion on divine favors must have perturbed even those who admired her. Sor Juana maintained that the greatest beneficences of G.o.d are negative: "To reward is beneficence, to punish is beneficence, and to suspend beneficence is the greatest beneficence and not to perform good acts the greatest goodness." In a nun who loved poetry and science and was more preoccupied with learning than with her own salvation, this idea ran the risk of being judged as something more than theological subtlety: if the greatest divine favor were indifference, did this not too greatly enlarge the sphere of free will?
The bishop of Puebla, the nun"s publisher and friend, did not conceal his disagreement. Under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea de la Cruz, he declared, in the missive that preceded the Carta atenagrica: "Although your discretion calls them blessings [the negative beneficences], I hold them to be punishments." Indeed, for the Christian there is no life outside of grace, and even liberty is a reflection of that grace. Moreover, the prelate did not content himself with demonstrating his lack of conformity with Sor Juana"s theology but manifested a still more decided and cutting reprobation of her intellectual and literary affinities: "I do not intend that you change your nature by renouncing books, but that you better it by reading that of Jesus Christ . . . it is a pity that so great an understanding lower itself in such a way by unworthy notice of the Earth that it have not desire to penetrate what transpires in Heaven; and, since it be already lowered to the ground, that it not descend further, to consider what transpires in h.e.l.l." The bishop"s letter brought Sor Juana face to face with the problem of her vocation and, more fundamentally, with her entire life. The theological discussion pa.s.sed to a second plane.
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz [Reply to Sister Filotea de la Cruz] was the last thing Sor Juana wrote. A critical autobiography, a defense of her right to learn, and a confession of the limits of all human learning, this text announced her final submission. Two years later she sold her books and abandoned herself to the powers of silence. Ripe for death, she did not escape the epidemic of 1695.1 I fear that it may not be possible to understand what her work and her life tell us unless first we understand the meaning of this renunciation of the word. To hear what the cessation of her voice says to us is more than a baroque formula for comprehension. For, if silence is "a negative thing," not speaking is not: the characteristic function of silence is not at all the same thing as having nothing to say. Silence is inexpressible, the sonorous expression of nothingness; not speaking is significant: even in regard to "those things one cannot say, it is needful to say at least that they cannot be said, so that it may be understood that not speaking is not ignorance of what to say, but rather is being unable to express the many things that are to be said." What is it that the last years of Sor Juana keep silent from us? And does what they keep silent belong to the realm of silence, that is, of the inexpressible, or to that of not speaking, which speaks through allusions and signs?
Sor Juana"s crisis coincided with the upheaval and the public calamities that darkened the end of the seventeenth century in Mexico. It does not seem reasonable to believe that the first was an effect of the second. This kind of linear explanation necessitates another. The chain of cause and effect is endless. Furthermore, one cannot use history to explain culture as if it were a matter of different orders: one the world of facts, the other that of works. Facts are inseparable from works. Man moves in a world of works. Culture is history. And one may add that what is peculiar to history is culture and that there is no history except that of culture: the history of men"s works and the history of men in their works. Thus, Sor Juana"s silence and the tumultuous events of 1692 are closely related facts and are unintelligible except within the history of colonial culture. Both are consequences of a historical crisis little studied until now.
In the temporal sphere New Spain had been founded as the harmonious and hierarchical coexistence of many races and nations under the shadow of the Austrian monarchy; in the spiritual sphere, upon the universality of the Christian revelation. The superiority of the Spanish monarchy to the Aztec state was somewhat similar to that of the new religion: both const.i.tuted an open order capable of including all men and all races. The temporal order was just, moreover, because it was based upon the Christian revelation, upon the divine and rational word. Renouncing the rational word-keeping silent-and burning the Court of Justice, a symbol of the state, were acts of similar significance. In these acts New Spain expressed itself as negation. But this negation was not made against an external power: through these acts the colony negated itself and renounced its own existence, but no affirmation was born out of this negation. The poet fell silent, the intellectual abdicated, the people rebelled. The crisis led to silence. All doors were closed and colonial history was revealed as an adventure without an exit.
The meaning of the colonial crisis may be misunderstood if one yields to the temptation of considering it as a prophecy of independence. This would be true if independence were solely the extreme consequence of the dissolution of the Spanish Empire. But it was something more and also something substantially different: it was a revolution, that is, the exchange of the colonial order for another. Or say it was a complete beginning again of America"s history. In spite of what many think, the colonial world did not give birth to an independent Mexico: there was a rupture and, following that, an order founded on principles and inst.i.tutions radically different from the old ones.2 That is why the nineteenth century has seemed remote from its colonial past. No one recognized himself as being in the tradition of New Spain because, in fact, the liberals who brought about independence were of a different tradition. For more than a century, Mexico has lived without a past.
If the crisis that closed the period of the Austrian monarchy did not prophesy independence, then what was its meaning? Compared to the plurality of nations and tongues that comprised the pre-Hispanic world, New Spain presented a unitarian structure: all peoples and all men had a place in that universal order. In Sor Juana"s villancicos ("Christmas carols") a heterogeneous mult.i.tude confesses a single faith and a single loyalty, in Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish. Colonial Catholicism was as universal as the monarchy, and all the old G.o.ds and ancient mythologies, scarcely disguised, could be accommodated in its heavens. Abandoned by their divinities, the Indians, through baptism, renewed their ties with the divine and once again found their place in this world and in the other. The uprooting effect of the Conquest was resolved into the discovery of an ultraterrestrial home. But Catholicism arrived in Mexico as a religion already formed and on the defensive. Few have pointed out that the apogee of the Catholic religion in America coincided with its European twilight: sunset there was dawn among us. The new religion was a centuries-old religion with a subtle and complex philosophy that left no door open to the ardors of investigation or the doubts of speculation. This difference in historical rhythm-the root of the crisis-is also perceivable in other orbits, from the economic to the literary. In all orders the situation was similar: there was nothing to invent, nothing to add, nothing to propose. Scarcely born, New Spain was an opulent flower condemned to a premature and static maturity. Sor Juana embodies this maturity. Her poetry is an excellent showcase of sixteenth and seventeenth-century styles. a.s.suredly, at times-as in her imitation of Jacinto Polo de Medina-she is superior to her model, but she discovered no new worlds. The same is true of her theater, and the greatest praise one can offer of El divino Narciso [The divine Narcissus] is that it is not unworthy of the Calderonian sacramental plays. (Only in Primero sueo [First dream], for reasons that will be examined later, does she surpa.s.s her masters.) In short, Sor Juana never transcended the style of her epoch. It was not possible for her to break those forms that imprisoned her so subtly and within which she moved with such elegance: to destroy them would have been to repudiate her own being. The conflict was insoluble because her only escape would have demanded the destruction of the very foundations of the colonial world.
As it was not possible to deny the principles on which that society rested without repudiating oneself, it was also impossible to propose others. Neither the tradition nor the history of New Spain could propose alternative solutions. It is true that two centuries later other principles were adopted, but one must remember that they came from outside, from France and the United States, and would form a different society. At the end of the seventeenth century the colonial world lost any possibility of renewing itself: the same principles that had engendered it were now choking it.
Denying this world and affirming another were acts that could not have the same significance for Sor Juana that they had for the great spirits of the Counter Reformation or the evangelists of New Spain. For Saints Theresa and Ignatius, renunciation of this world did not signify resignation or silence, but a change of destiny: history, and human action with it, opened to the other world and thus acquired new fecundity. The mystic life did not consist so much of quitting this world as of introducing personal life into sacred history. Militant Catholicism, evangelical or reformist, impregnated history with meaning, and the negation of the world was translated finally into an affirmation of historical action. In contrast, the truly personal portion of Sor Juana"s work does not touch upon either action or contemplation, but upon knowledge-a knowledge that questions this world but does not judge it. This new kind of knowledge was impossible within the tenets of her historical universe. For more than twenty years Sor Juana adhered to her purpose. And she did not yield until all doors were definitely closed. Within herself the conflict was radical: knowledge is dream. When history awakened her from her dream, at the end of her life, she ceased to speak. Her awakening closed the golden dream of the viceroyship. If we do not understand her silence, we cannot comprehend what Primero sueo and Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz really mean: knowledge is impossible, and all utterance flows into silence. In understanding her silence one deciphers glories amid characters of devastation.
Ambiguous glories. Everything in her-vocation, soul, body-was ambivalent. While she was still a child her family sent her to live in Mexico City with relatives. At sixteen she was lady-in-waiting to the Marquesa de Mancera, vicereine of New Spain. Through the biography by Father P. Diego Calleja we are able to hear the echoes of the celebrations and compet.i.tions in which the young prodigy Juana shone. Beautiful and alone, she was not without suitors. But she chose not to be the "white wall upon which all would throw mud." She took the habit, because, "considering my totally negative att.i.tude toward matrimony, it seemed the most fitting and most decent thing I could choose." We know now that she was an illegitimate child. Had she been legitimate, would she have chosen married life? This possibility is dubious. When Sor Juana speaks of her intellectual vocation she seems sincere: neither the absence of worldly love nor the urgency of divine love led her to the cloister. The convent was an expedient, a reasonable solution, offering refuge and solitude. The cell was an asylum, not a hermit"s cave. Laboratory, library, salon, there she received visitors and conversed with them; poems were read, discussions held, and good music heard. She partic.i.p.ated from the convent in both intellectual and courtly life. She was constantly writing poetry. She wrote plays, Christmas carols, prologues, treatises on music, and reflections on morality. Between the viceregal palace and the convent flowed a constant exchange of rhymes and civilities, compliments, satirical poems, and pet.i.tions. Indulged child, the tenth Muse.
"The tender phrases of the Mexican language" appear in her villancicos along with black Congolese and the unpolished speech of the Basque. With complete awareness, and even a certain coquetry, Sor Juana employs all those rare spices: What magic infusions known to the Indian herbsmen of my country spread their enchantment among my writings?
We would be in error if we confused the baroque aesthetic-which opened doors to the exoticism of the New World-with a preoccupation with nationalism. Actually one might say precisely the opposite. This predilection for languages and native dialects-in imitation of Luis de Gngora-does not so much reveal a hypothetical divination of future nationalism as a lively consciousness of the universality of the empire: Indians, Creoles, mulattoes, and Spaniards form one whole. Her preoccupation with pre-Columbian religions-apparent in the prologue to El divino Narciso-has similar meaning. The functions of the church were no different from those of the empire: to conciliate antagonisms and to embrace all differences in one superior truth.
Love is one of the constant themes in her poetry. Scholars say that she loved and was loved. She herself tells us this in various lyrics and sonnets-although in Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz she warns us that everything she wrote, except for Primero sueho, was commissioned. It is of little importance whether these were her loves or another"s, whether they were experienced or imagined: by the grace of her poetry she made them her own. Her eroticism is intellectual; by that I do not mean that it is lacking in either profundity or authenticity. Like all great lovers, Sor Juana delights in the dialectic of pa.s.sion; also, for she is sensual, in its rhetoric, which is not the same as the rhetorical pa.s.sions of some female poets. The men and women in her poems are images, shadows "fashioned by fantasy." Her Platonism is not exempt from ardor. She feels her body is like a s.e.xless flame: And I know that my body- never inclining to one or the other- is neuter, or abstract, everything the soul alone safekeeps.
The question is a burning one. Thus she leaves it "so that others may air it," since one should not attempt subtleties about things that are best ignored. No less ambiguous is her att.i.tude toward the two s.e.xes. The men of her sonnets and lyrics are fleeting shadows exemplifying absence and disdain. However, her portraits of women are splendid, especially those of the vicereines who protected her, the Marquesa de Mancera and the Condesa de Paredes. Sor Juana"s poem that "paints the beautiful proportions of the Lady Paredes" is one of the memorable works of Gongoristic poetry. This pa.s.sion should not scandalize: To be a woman and to be absent is no impediment to loving you, for souls, as you know, ignore distance and gender.
The same rationale appears in almost all her amorous poetry-and also in the poems that treat the friendship she professes for Phyllis or Lysis: "Pure love, without desire for indecencies, can feel what profanest love feels." It would be excessive to speak of h.o.m.os.e.xuality; it is not excessive to observe that she herself does not hide the ambiguity of her feelings. In one of her most profound sonnets she repeats: Though you may thwart the tight bond that enclasped your fantastic form, it is little use to evade arms and breast if my fantasy builds you a prison.
Her loves, real or imagined, were without doubt chaste. She loved the body with her soul, but who can trace the boundaries between one and the other? For us, body and soul are one, or almost so: our idea of the body is colored by the spirit, and vice versa. Sor Juana lived in a world based on dualism, and for her the problem was easier to resolve, as much in the sphere of ideas as in that of conduct. When the Marquesa de Mancera died, she asked: Beauteous compound, in Laura divided, immortal soul, glorious spirit, why leave a body so beautiful, and why bid farewell to such a soul?
Sor Juana moved among shadows: those of untouchable bodies and fleeting souls. For her, only divine love was both concrete and ideal. But Sor Juana is not a mystic poet, and in her religious poems divinity is an abstraction. G.o.d is Idea and Concept, and even where she visibly follows the mystics she resists mixing the earthly and the heavenly. Divine love is rational love.
These were not her great love. From the time of her childhood she was inclined toward learning. As an adolescent she conceived the project of dressing as a man and attending the university. Resigned to being self-taught, she complained: "How hard it is to study those soulless marks on the page, lacking the living voice of the master." And she added that all these labors "were suffered for the love of learning; oh, had it only been for the love of G.o.d-which were proper-how worthwhile it would have been!" This lament is a confession: the knowledge she seeks is not in sacred books. If theology is the "queen of the sciences," she lingers on her outer skirts: physics and logic, rhetoric and law. But her curiosity is not that of the specialist; she aspires to the integration of individual truths and insists upon the unity of learning. Variety does not harm general understanding; rather, it exacts it; all sciences are related: "It is the chain the ancients imagined issuing from the mouth of Jupiter, from which all things were suspended, linked one with another."
Her interest in science is impressive. In the lines of Primero sueo she describes, with a pedantry that makes us smile, the alimentary functions, the phenomenon of sleep and fantasy, the curative value of certain poisons, the Egyptian pyramids, and the magic lantern that reproduces, feigned on the white wall, various figures, helped no less by the shadows than by light in tremulous reflections . . .
Everything blends together: theology, science, baroque rhetoric, and true astonishment before the universe. Her att.i.tude is rare in the Hispanic tradition. For the great Spaniards learning resolved into either heroic action or negation of the world (positive negation, to state it differently). For Sor Juana the world is a problem. For her, everything stimulates questions; her whole being is one excited question. The universe is a vast labyrinth within which the soul can find no unraveling thread, "shifting sands making it impossible for those attempting to follow a course." Nothing is further removed from this rational puzzle than the image of the world left us by the Spanish cla.s.sics. There, science and action are blended. To learn is to act, and all action, like all learning, is related to the world beyond. Within this tradition disinterested learning is blasphemy or madness.
The church did not judge Sor Juana mad or blasphemous, but it did lament her deviation. In Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz she tells us that "they mortified and tormented me by saying, These studies are not in conformance with saintly ignorance, she will be lost, she will faint away at such heights in her own perspicacity and acuity." Double solitude: that of the conscience and that of being a woman. A superior-"very saintly and very candid, who believed that study was a matter for the Inquisition"-ordered her not to study. Her confessor tightened the ring and for two years denied her spiritual a.s.sistance. It was difficult to resist so much opposing pressure, as before it had been difficult not to be disoriented by the adulation of the court. Sor Juana persisted. Using the texts of the church fathers as support, she defended her right-and that of all women-to knowledge. And not only to learning, but also to teaching: "What is unseemly in an elderly woman"s having as her charge the education of young ladies?"
Versatile, attracted by a thousand things at once, she defended herself by studying, and, studying, she retreated. If her superiors took away her books, she still had her mind, that consumed more matter in a quarter of an hour than books in four years. Not even in sleep was she liberated "from this continuous movement of my imagination; rather it is wont to work more freely, less enc.u.mbered, in my sleep . . . arguing and making verses that would fill a very large catalogue." This is one of her most beautiful confessions and one that gives us the key to her major poem: dreaming is a longer and more lucid wakefulness. Dreaming is knowing. In addition to diurnal learning arises another, necessarily rebellious form of learning, beyond the law and subject to a punishment that stimulates the spirit more than it terrorizes it. I need not emphasize here how the concept that governs Primero sueo coincides with some of modern poetry"s preoccupations.
We owe the best and clearest description of the subject matter of Primero sueo to Father Calleja"s biography: "It being nighttime, I slept. I dreamed that once and for all I desired to understand all the things that comprise the universe: I could not, not even as they are divided into categories, not even an individual one. The dawn came and, disillusioned, I awoke." Sor Juana declared that she wrote the poem as a deliberate imitation of Soledades [Solitudes]. But Primero sueo is a poem about nocturnal astonishment, while Gongora"s poem is about daytime. There is nothing behind the images of the Cordovan poet because his world is pure image, a splendor of appearances. Sor Juana"s universe-barren of color, abounding in shadows, abysses, and sudden clearings-is a labyrinth of symbols, a rational delirium. Primero sueo is a poem about knowledge. This distinguishes it from Gongoristic poetry and, more finally, from all baroque poetry. This very quality binds it, unexpectedly, to German Romantic poetry and through that to the poetry of our own time.
In some pa.s.sages the baroque verse resists the unusual exercise of transcribing concepts and abstract formulas into images. The language becomes abrupt and pedantic. In other lines, the best and most intense, expression becomes dizzying in its lucidity. Sor Juana creates an abstract and hallucinatory landscape formed of cones, obelisks, pyramids, geometric precipices, and aggressive peaks. Her world partakes of mechanics and of myth. The sphere and the triangle rule its empty sky. Poetry of science, but also of nocturnal terror. The poem begins when night reigns over the world. Everything sleeps, overcome by dreams. The king and the thief sleep, the lovers and the solitary. The body lies delivered unto itself. Diminished life of the body, disproportionate life of the spirit, freed from its corporeal weight. Nourishment, transformed into heat, engenders sensations that fantasy converts into images. On the heights of her mental pyramid-formed by all the powers of the spirit, memory and imagination, judgment and fantasy-the soul contemplates the phantasms of the world and, especially, those figures of the mind, "the clear intellectual stars" of her interior sky. In them the soul recreates itself in itself. Later, the soul dissociates itself from this contemplation and spreads its gaze over all creation; the world"s diversity dazzles it and finally blinds it. An intellectual eagle, the soul hurls itself from the precipice "into the neutrality of a sea of astonishment." The fall does not annihilate it. Incapable of flight, it climbs. Painfully, step by step, it ascends the pyramid. Since method must repair the "defect of being unable to know all of creation in an intuitive act," it divides the world into categories, grades of knowledge. Primero sueo describes the progress of thought, a spiral that ascends from the inanimate toward man and his symbol, the triangle, a figure in which animal and divine converge. Man is the site of creation"s rendezvous, life"s highest point of tension, always between two abysses: "lofty lowliness . . . at the mercy of amorous union." But method does not remedy the limitations of the spirit. Understanding cannot discern the ties that unite the inanimate to the animate, vegetable to animal, animal to man. Nor is it even feasible to penetrate the most simple phenomenon: the individual is as irreducible as the species. Darkly it realizes that the immense variety of creation is resolved in one law but that that law is ineffable. The soul vacillates. Perhaps it would be better to retreat. Examples of other defeats rise up as a warning to the imprudent. The warning becomes a challenge; the spirit becomes inflamed as it sees that others did not hesitate to "make their names eternal in their ruin." The poem is peopled with Promethean images; the act of knowing, not knowledge itself, is the battle prize. The fallen soul affirms itself and, making cajolery of its terror, hastens to elect new courses. In that instant the fasting body reclaims its own dominion. The sun bursts forth. Images dissolve. Knowledge is a dream. But the sun"s victory is partial and cyclical. It triumphs in half the world; in the other half it is vanquished. Rebellious night, "recovered by reason of its fall," erects its empire in the territories the sun forsakes. There, other souls dream Sor Juana"s dream. The universe the poem reveals to us is ambivalent: wakefulness is dream; the night"s defeat, its victory. The dream of knowledge also means: knowledge is dream. Each affirmation carries within it its own negation.
Sor Juana"s night is not the carnal night of lovers. Neither is it the night of the mystics. It is an intellectual night, lofty and fixed like an immense eye, a night firmly constructed above the void, rigorous geometry, taciturn obelisk, all of it fixed tension directed toward the heavens. This vertical impulse is the only thing that recalls other nights of Spanish mysticism. But the mystics seem to be attracted to heaven by lines of celestial forces, as one sees in certain of El Greco"s paintings. In Primero sueo the heavens are closed; the heights are hostile to flight. Silence confronting man: the desire for knowledge is illicit and the soul that dreams of knowledge is rebellious. Nocturnal solitude of the consciousness. Drought, vertigo, palpitation. But, nevertheless, all is not adversity. In his solitude and his fall from the heights man affirms himself in himself: to know is to dream, but that dream is everything we know of ourselves, and in that dream resides our greatness. It is a game of mirrors in which the soul loses each time it wins and wins each time it loses, and the poem"s emotion springs from the awareness of this ambiguity. Sor Juana"s cyclical and vertiginous night suddenly reveals its fixed center: Primero sueo is a poem not of knowledge but of the act of knowing. And thus Sor Juana trans.m.u.tes her historical and personal ill fortunes, makes victory of her defeat, song of her silence. Once again poetry is nourished by history and biography. Once again it transcends them.
M.S.P.
Notes.
1. Among the few things found in her cell was an unfinished poem "in recognition of the inimitable writers of Europe who made their works greater by their praise."
2. It is true that many colonial traits were prolonged until 1857-even to our own time-but as inertia, obstacles, and obstinate survival, like facts that have lost their historical meaning.
The Siren and the Seash.e.l.l
[DELHI, 1964].
. . . the race that creates life with the Pythagorean numbers.
Ruben Daro According to the textbooks, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the golden age of Spanish literature. Juan Ramn Jimenez has said that they were not gold but gilded cardboard. It would be fairer to say that they were the centuries of Spanish rage. The Spaniards wrote, painted, and dreamed in the same frenzy in which they destroyed and created nations. Everything was carried to extremes: they were the first to circ.u.mnavigate the earth, and at the same time they were the inventors of quietism. A thirst for s.p.a.ce, a hunger for death. Lope de Vega was prolific, even profligate: he wrote something over one thousand plays. Saint John of the Cross was temperate, even miserly: his poetical works consist of three longish lyrics and a few songs and ballads. A delirium, whether boisterous or reserved, bloodthirsty or pious: in all colors, in all directions. The lucid delirium of Cervantes, Velzquez, Caldern. Quevedo"s labyrinth of conceits. Gngora"s jungle of verbal stalact.i.tes. And then, suddenly, the stage was bare, as if the whole performance had been a magician"s show rather than historical reality. Nothing was left, nothing but ghostly reflections. During all of the eighteenth century there was no Swift or Pope, no Rousseau or Laclos, anywhere in Spanish literature. In the second half of the nineteenth century a few faint signs of life began to appear: Gustavo Becquer, Rosala de Castro. But there was no one to compare with Coleridge, Leopardi, Hlderlin, no one resembled Baudelaire. Then, at the close of the century, everything changed again, just as violently. A new group of poets burst onto the scene without warning; at the beginning, few listened to them and many jeered. But a few years later, through the efforts of the very figures whom the "serious" critics had called Frenchified outsiders, the Spanish language was on its feet, alive again. Not so opulent as it had been during the baroque period, but stronger, clearer, better controlled.
The last major baroque poet was a Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Two centuries later, the revival of Spanish literature, and of the language itself, was also begun here in the New World. The movement known as Modernism had a double importance: on the one hand, it produced four or five poets who linked up the great chain of Spanish tradition that had come apart at the end of the seventeenth century; on the other hand, it opened windows and doors so that the fresh air of the times could revive the language. Modernism was not merely a school of poetry; it was also a dancing cla.s.s, a gymnasium, a circus, and a masked ball. After that experience, the language could put up with the most strenuous tests, the most dangerous escapades. If we recognize Modernism for what it really was-a movement whose foundations and primordial goal were the movement itself-we can see that it has not yet ended: the vanguard of 1925 and the efforts of contemporary poets are intimately linked to that great beginning. In its day, Modernism aroused fervid support and no less vehement opposition. A few writers received it with reserve: Miguel de Unamuno did not disguise his hostility, and Antonio Machado kept his distance. No matter: both of them were affected by Modernism. Their poetry would be different without the discoveries and conquests of the Spanish American poets; and their diction, above all when they tried most ostensibly to avoid the accents and modes of the innovators, is a sort of involuntary homage to the very movement it rejects. Their work is inseparable from what it denies, precisely because it is a reaction: it is not beyond Ruben Daro but is facing him. That is natural enough: Modernism was the language of the epoch, its historical style, and all creators were condemned to breathe its atmosphere.
Every language, not excluding that of liberty, eventually becomes a prison, and there is a point in the process at which speed becomes confused with immobility. The great Modernist poets were the first to rebel, and in their mature work they go beyond the language that they themselves had created. Therefore, each in his own way prepared for the subversion of the vanguard: Leopoldo Lugones was the immediate antecedent of the new poetry in Mexico (Ramn Lpez Velarde) and Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges); Juan Ramn Jimenez was the guiding spirit of the generation of Jorge Guillen and Federico Garcia Lorca; Ramn del Valle-Incln is a presence in the modern theater and will daily become more influential. Daro"s place is central, even if one believes, as I do, that of the great Modernists he is least a presence. He is not a living force but a point of reference, a point of departure or arrival, a boundary that has to be reached or crossed. To be like him or not: either way, Daro is present in the spirit of contemporary poets. He is the founder.
The history of Modernism extends from 1880 to 1910 and has been recounted many times. I will mention only what is essential. With two or three minor exceptions, Spanish and Spanish American Romanticism gave us few works of any note. None of our Romantic poets had a clear awareness of what that great change really signified. In Spanish, Romanticism was a school of rebellion and oratory, but it was not a vision in the meaning that Arnim gave to the word: "We call sacred poets seers, we call poetic creation a superior kind of vision." With these words, Romanticism proclaimed the superiority of poetic vision to religious revelation. We were also lacking in irony, which is something very different from sarcasm or invective: separation of the object by the insertion of the I; disillusionment with the consciousness, which is unable to annul the distance that separates it from the world outside; an insensate dialogue between the infinite I and finite s.p.a.ce or between mortal man and the immortal universe. Furthermore, there was no recognition of the alliance between dreaming and waking, no presentiment that reality is a constellation of symbols, no belief in the creative imagination as the prime faculty of understanding. In sum, a lack of awareness of the divided self and its desire for unity. The poverty of our Romanticism becomes even more disconcerting when we recall that for the German and English poets Spain was the chosen land of the Romantic spirit. The Jena group discovered Caldern; Sh.e.l.ley translated fragments of his theater; and one of the central books of German Romanticism, the powerful and fascinating t.i.tan, is impregnated with irony, magic, and other fantastic elements that Jean Paul probably drew from one of the least studied (and most modern) works of Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda [The misfortunes of Persiles and Segismunda]. When Romanticism flickered out, there was nothing left, and Spanish literature oscillated between oratory and chitchat, academia and the cafe.
The inspiration for our Romantic writers had come from France. Although it is true that French Romanticism did not produce writers comparable to those of Germany and England (if we except Gerard de Nerval, and the Victor Hugo of La fin de Satan), the succeeding generation produced a group of works in which the aims of Romanticism were both achieved and transcended. Baudelaire and his great descendants gave Romanticism a new consciousness, a significant form. Also, and above all, they made poetry a total experience, at once verbal and spiritual. For them the word did not merely speak the world; it also established it-or changed it. The poem became a s.p.a.ce inhabited by living symbols; the written language was brought to life by the anima, the soul.
During the last third of the nineteenth century, the frontiers of poetry-the frontiers of the unknown-were in France. In the works of French poets the Romantic inspiration turned in on itself, contemplated itself. Enthusiasm, which for Novalis was the origin of poetry, changed into the reflectiveness of Mallarme; the divided consciousness took revenge on the object for being opaque by eliminating it. But Spanish writers, despite their nearness to that magnetic center that was French poetry (or, perhaps, because of their nearness), were not attracted by the adventures of those years. On the other hand, the Spanish Americans, dissatisfied with the pretentious prattle emanating from Spain, understood that nothing personal could be said in a language that had lost the secret of metamorphosis and surprise. They felt themselves to be different from the Spaniards and turned almost instinctively toward France, divining that not a new world but a new language was being born there. They made that language their own in order to be more themselves, in order to say what they wanted to say. Hence the main accomplishment of the reforms carried out by the Spanish American Modernists was to appropriate and a.s.similate modern European poetry. Their immediate model was French poetry, not only because it was the most accessible but also because they saw in it, rightly, the most compelling, audacious, and complete expression of the tendencies of the period.
In its first phase, Modernism was not an organized movement. Isolated figures appeared in various places, almost at the same time: Jose Mart in New York, Julin del Casal in Havana, Manuel Gutierrez Njera and Salvador Daz Mirn in Mexico City, Jose Asuncin Silva in Bogot, Ruben Daro in Santiago de Chile. They soon came to know one another and to realize that their individual efforts were part of a general change in sensibility and language. Little by little they formed small groups and even published their own magazines, such as Gutierrez Njera"s Revista Azul [Blue review]; the diffuse tendencies crystallized and two centers of activity were formed, one in Buenos Aires, the other in Mexico City. This period has been called the second generation of Modernism. Ruben Daro was the point of connection between the two periods. The premature deaths of most of the initiators, and his gifts as critic and stimulus, made him the recognized leader of the movement. More clearly than had their precursors the new poets understood that their work was the first truly independent expression in Spanish American literature. They were not intimidated when traditional critics called them outsiders: they knew that no one finds himself until he has left his birthplace.
The French influence was predominant but not exclusive. With the exception of Mart, who knew and loved the literature of England and the United States, and Silva, "impa.s.sioned reader of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Mallarme,"1 the first Modernists went on from the cult of French Romanticism to that of Parna.s.sianism. The second generation, in full development, "added to the Parna.s.sian style, which was rich in vision, the Symbolist style, which was rich in music."2 Their curiosity was both extensive and intense, but at times their enthusiasm clouded their judgment. They were equally impressed by Gautier and Mendes, Heredia and Mallarme. A good indication of their preferences can be found in the series of literary portraits that Ruben Daro published in an Argentine newspaper, almost all of them later brought together in Los raros [The rare ones] (1896). In these articles the names of Poe, Villiers de l"Isle-Adam, Bloy, Nietzsche, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Lautreamont are jumbled together with those of minor or now-forgotten writers. Only one of the figures he discusses wrote in the Spanish language, the Cuban Jose Mart. There is also a Portuguese, Eugenio de Castro, the initiator of free verse in Portugal. In some cases Daro"s instincts were amazing: he was the first person outside of France to be interested in Lautreamont. (In France itself, if I remember correctly, only Leon Bloy and Remy de Gourmont had written earlier about Lautreamont. Also, I suspect that Daro was the first person writing in Spanish to allude to Sade, in a sonnet dedicated to Valle-Incln.) Many other names must of course be added to this list. It will suffice to mention the most important. First of all, Baudelaire, and then Jules La-forgue, both of them decisive in the development of the second generation of Modernists; the Belgian Symbolists; Stefan George, Wilde, and Swinburne; and, more as an example and stimulus than as a direct model, Whitman. Although not all his idols were French, Daro once said-perhaps to annoy the Spanish critics who accused him of mental Gallicism-that "Modernism is nothing else but Castilian prose and verse pa.s.sed through the fine sieve of good French prose and verse." But it would be a mistake to reduce the movement to a mere imitation of France. The originality of Modernism does not lie in its mastery of influences but in its own creations.
Beginning in 1888, Daro used the word "Modernism" to designate the tendencies of the Spanish American poets. In 1898 he wrote: "The new spirit that today animates a small but proud and triumphant group of Spanish American writers and poets: Modernism." Later he would say "the moderns," "modernity." During his long and extensive activities as a critic he never stopped repeating that the distinctive characteristic of the new poets, their reason for being, was the will to be modern. Somewhat as the term "vanguard" is a metaphor revealing a conception of literary activities as warfare, the term "Modernist" reveals a kind of ingenuous faith in the superiority of the future or, to be more exact, of the present. The first implies a spatial vision of literature; the second, a temporal conception. The vanguard wants to conquer a location; Modernism seeks to locate itself in the present. Only those who feel that they are not wholly in the present, who sense that they are outside of living history, postulate contemporaneity as a goal. To be a contemporary of Goethe or Tamerlane is a coincidence, happy or otherwise, in which one"s will plays no part; to desire to be their contemporary implies a will to partic.i.p.ate, intellectually, in the actions of history, to share a history that belongs to others but that one somehow makes one"s own. It is an affinity and a distance-and an awareness of that situation. The Modernists did not want to be French: they wanted to be modern. Technological progress had partially eliminated the distance between America and Europe. That nearness made our remoteness more vivid and perceptible. A trip to Paris or London was not a visit to another continent but a leap to another century. It has been said that Modernism was an evasion of American realities. It would be more accurate to say that it was a flight from the local present-which was, in their eyes, an anachronism-and a search for the universal present, which is the only true one. Modernity and cosmopolitanism were synonymous to Ruben Daro and his friends. They were not anti-Latin American; they wanted a Latin America that would be contemporaneous with Paris and London.
The purest, most immediate manifestation of time is the now. Time is that which is pa.s.sing: the present. Geographic and historical remoteness, exoticism and archaism, fuse in an instantaneous present at the touch of actuality: they become presence. The attraction for the Modernists of the most distant past and the most remote countries-medieval and Byzantine legends and figures from pre-Columbian America and the Orient that in those years the European sensibility was discovering or inventing-was one of the forms of their appet.i.te for the present. However, they were not fascinated by the machine, the essence of the modern world, but by the creations of Art Nouveau. Modernity for them was not industry but luxury. Instead of the straight line, Aubrey Beardsley"s arabesques. Their mythology was that of Gustave Moreau (to whom Julin del Casal dedicated a group of sonnets); their secret paradises, those of the Huysmans of A rebours [Against the grain]; their h.e.l.ls, those of Poe and Baudelaire. A Marxist would say, with some justice, that it was a literature of the leisure cla.s.s, with no historical mission, soon to be extinguished. One could reply that their rejection of the useful and their exaltation of art as the supreme good were something more than the hedonism of landholders: they were a rebellion against social pressures and a critique of the abject realities that prevailed in Latin America. Besides, in some of these poets we find political radicalism alongside the most extreme aesthetic positions: it is hardly necessary to mention Jose Mart, the liberator of Cuba, and Manuel Gonzlez Prada of Peru, one of our first anarchists. Leopoldo Lugones was one of the founders of Argentine socialism, and many of the Modernists partic.i.p.ated actively in the historical struggles of their day: Guillermo Valencia and Jose Mara Vargas Vila in Colombia, Jose Santos Chocano in Peru, and Salvador Daz Mirn in Mexico. Modernism was not a school of political abstention but of artistic purity. Their aestheticism did not spring from moral indifference. Nor was it hedonism. Art was for them a pa.s.sion, in the religious sense of the word, and like all pa.s.sions it demanded a sacrifice. Their love for modernity was not a cult of the fashionable, but rather a will to partic.i.p.ate in a historical plenitude that until then had been denied to Latin Americans. Modernity was simply history in its richest, most immediate form. Also, however, most painful: the moment swollen with omens, way of access to the actions of time. It was contemporaneity. Modernist art, decadent and barbaric, is a mult.i.tude of historical times, from the newest to the most ancient and from the nearest to the most distant, a totality of presences that the consciousness can take hold of at a single moment: and very eighteenth century and very ancient and very modern; daring, cosmopolitan . . .
It is still paradoxical that Spanish American poetry, almost as soon as it was born, declared itself to be cosmopolitan. What was the name of that cosmopolis? It was the city of cities: Nineveh, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires. It was the most transparent and deceptive form of actuality, since it had no name and occupied no location in s.p.a.ce. Modernism was an abstract pa.s.sion, although its poets amused themselves by acc.u.mulating all sorts of rare objects. Those objects were signs, not symbols: something interchangeable. Masks, a succession of masks that hid a tense, avid, perpetually questioning face. The Modernists" inordinate love for full and rounded forms, for sumptuous clothing and multicolored worlds, reveals an obsession. What those brilliant, sonorous metaphors express is not love for life but horror vacui. That perpetual search for the strange on condition that it be new-and of the new on condition that it be unique-was a hunger for presence rather than for the present. If Modernism was an appet.i.te for time, its best poets knew that theirs was a disembodied time. At first glance, actuality seems to be a plenitude of times, but it turns out to be lacking, deserted, inhabited by neither the past nor the future. Modernism was a movement condemned to deny itself because the movement was its only affirmation; it was an empty myth, an uninhabited soul, a nostalgia for true presence. That is the constant and central theme, the secret and never wholly enunciated theme, of the best Modernist poets.
Every revolution, including those in the arts, postulates a future that is also a return. At the Feast of the G.o.ddess Reason the Jacobins celebrated the destruction of an unjust present and the imminent arrival of a golden age anterior to history: Rousseau"s natural society. The revolutionary future is a privileged manifestation of cyclical time, announcing the return of an archetypal past. Hence, revolutionary action par excellence-the break with the immediate past and the establishment of a new order-is at the same time a restoration, that of an immemorial past, the origin of the ages. Revolution signifies return or repet.i.tion, both in the original meaning of the word-the rotation of the stars and other bodies-and in the meaning given it by our view of history. It is something more profound than a mere survival of archaic thought. Engels himself could not resist this almost spontaneous tendency in our thinking and decided that the first stage of human evolution was Morgan"s "primitive communism." Revolution frees us from the old order so that the primigenial order may reappear on a higher historical level. The future that the revolutionary proposes to us is a promise: the fulfillment of something that lies hidden, a seed of life, in the origin of the ages. The revolutionary order is the end of the bad ages and the beginning of the true age. That beginning is indeed a start, but above all it is an origin. Furthermore, it is the very foundation of time. Whatever it is called-reason, justice, brotherhood, natural harmony, the logic of history-it is something that is prior to historical times or that in some manner determines them. It is the principle3 par excellence, ruling what comes to pa.s.s. The gravitational force of time, that which gives meaning to its motion and fecundity to its turmoils, is a fixed point: that past that is a perpetual beginning.
Although the Modernists sang of the perpetual advent of the now, of its embodiment in this or that glorious or terrible form, their time marked time; it ran, but without moving. It lacked a future because it had been deprived of a past. Modernism was an aesthetic of luxury and death, a nihilistic aesthetic. However, that nihilism was more lived than a.s.sumed, more an affliction of the sensibilities than a confrontation by the spirit. A few of the Modernists, Daro first, recognized that the movement was simply a spin in the void, a mask with which the despairing consciousness both calmed and exacerbated itself. Their search, when it really was a search and not mere dissipation, was nostalgia for an origin. Man pursues his own self when he runs after this or that phantom: he seeks his beginning. Almost as soon as Modernism began to contemplate itself, it ceased to exist as a tendency. The collective adventure reached its end and individual exploration began. It was the supreme moment of the Modernist pa.s.sion, the instant of lucidity that was also the instant of death.
Search for an origin, recovery of an inheritance: it might seem that nothing could be more unlike the earliest tendencies of the movement. In 1896, filled with reformist zeal, Daro cried: "The new American poets who write in Spanish have had to move swiftly from the mental independence of Spain . . . to the current that today, throughout the world, unites those distinguished groups that make up the cultivation and the life of a cosmopolitan and universal art." Unlike the Spaniards, Daro did not place the universal in opposition to the cosmopolitan; on the contrary, he held that the new art was universal because it was cosmopolitan. It was the art of the great city. Modern society, he said, "builds a Tower of Babel in which everyone understands everyone else." (I am not sure that the same is true in the new Babels, but contemporary reality, as one can see from the history of twentieth-century artistic movements, confirms Daro"s view of the cosmopolitan character of modern art.) His opposition to Hispanism was a part of his love for modernity, and thus his criticism of the tradition was a criticism of Spain. His anti-Spanish att.i.tude had a dual origin. On the one hand, it expressed a determination to break away from the ancient metropolis: "Our movement has given us a place apart, independent of Castilian literature." On the other, it identified Hispanism with traditionalism: "The evolution that brought Castilian to this renascence had to take place in America, since Spain is walled about by tradition, fenced and bristling with Hispanism."
Modernism, a verbal reform, was a syntax, a prosody, a vocabulary. Its poets enriched the language with imports from French and English; they made excessive use of archaisms and neologisms; and they were the first to employ the language of conversation. Furthermore, it is often forgotten that the Modernists" poems contain a great many Americanisms and indigenisms. Their cosmopolitanism could include both the achievements of the French naturalistic novel and American linguistic forms. A part of their lexicon has become as dated as the furniture and other objects of Art Nouveau; the rest has entered the mainstream of the language. Instead of attacking the syntax of Castilian, the Modernists restored its naturalness and avoided Latinate inversions and overemphasis. They exaggerated rather than inflated; they were often slightly ridiculous but never rigid. In spite of their swans and gondolas, they gave Spanish poetry a flexibility and familiarity that were never vulgar and that would lend themselves admirably to the two main tendencies of contemporary poetry: a love for the unexpected image and for poetic prosaicness.
Their reforms affected prosody above all, for Modernism was a prodigious exploration of the rhythmic possibilities of our language. The Modernist poets" interest in metrical problems embraced both theory and practice. Some of them wrote treatises on versification: Manuel Gonzlez Prada pointed out that Castilian meters are formed of binary, ternary, and quaternary elements, rising or falling; Ricardo Jaimes Freyre wrote that it was a matter of prosodic periods of no more than nine syllables. For both poets the beat of the tonic accent was the essential element of verse. They were both inspired by the doctrine of Andres Bello, who as early as 1835 had said, contrary to predominant opinion, that each metric unit is composed of prosodic phrases-something similar to Greek and Roman feet but determined by accentuation rather than by syllabic quant.i.ty. Thus Modernism renewed the tradition of irregular versification that was as old as the language itself, as Pedro Henrquez Urea has shown. But theoretical conclusions were not the origin of metric reform; rather, they were the natural consequence of poetic activity. In short, the novelty of Modernism consisted in the invention of meters; its originality, in the resurrection of accentuated rhythm.
In its use of rhythm, as in everything else, our Romanticism stopped halfway along the road. The Modernist poets a.s.similated the Romantic tendency toward greater rhythmic liberty and subjected it to a discipline learned in France. The French example was not the only one. The rhythmic translations of Poe, Germanic verse, the influence of Eugenio de Castro, and the reading of Whitman were all antecedents to the first semifree poems; and toward the end of Modernism the Mexican Jose Juan Tablada, precursor of the vanguard, introduced the haiku, a form that undoubtedly influenced Juan Ramn Jimenez and perhaps even Antonio Machado, as any attentive reader can attest. It is pointless to enumerate all the experiments and innovations of the Modernists: the resurrection of the anapestic and Provengal hendecasyllables; the breaking up of the rigid division of the hemistichs of the alexandrine line, thanks to enjambment; the vogue of nine and twelve-syllable lines; the changes in accentuation; the invention of long lines (up to twenty or more syllables); the mixture of different measures with the same syllabic base (ternary or quaternary); ametric lines; the return to traditional forms like the Galician-Portuguese cosante . . . The richness of Modernist rhythms is unique in the history of the language and its reforms prepared the way for the prose poem and free verse. What I want most to emphasize is that cosmopolitanism led Latin American poets to attempt many new graftings and cross-pollinations and that those experiences revealed to them the true tradition of Spanish poetry: rhythmic versification. The discovery was not accidental. It represented more than a style of rhetoric: it was an aesthetic and, above all, a world vision, a way of feeling, of knowing, and of expressing it.
This search for a modern and cosmopolitan tongue led the Spanish American poet, through a process apparently intricate but basically natural, to a rediscovery of the Hispanic tradition. I say the, not a, Spanish tradition because, unlike the tradition defended by the "purists," that discovered by the Modernists is the central and most ancient tradition of the language. And, precisely because of this fact, they could see it as that immemorial past that is also a perpetual beginning. Although it had been ignored by the traditionalists, that current was shown to be universal; it was the same principle4 that ruled the work of the great Romantics and Symbolists: rhythm as the source of poetic creation and as the key to the universe. Thus it was not merely a question of restoration. As it recovered the Spanish tradition, Modernism added something new, something that had never existed before in that tradition. Modernism was a true beginning. Like French Symbolism, the Spanish American movement was a reaction against the vagueness and facility of the Romantics and at the same time our true Romanticism. The universe is a system of correspondences, ruled by rhythm; everything is coded, everything rhymes; every natural form says something, nature expresses itself in each of its changes; to be a poet is to be not the master but the agent of the transmission of rhythm; the highest form of imagination is the a.n.a.logy. In all of Modernist poetry there is an echo of the Vers dores: "Un mystere d"amour dans le metal repose; tout est sensible."
Nostalgia for cosmic oneness is a constant preoccupation of the Modernist poet, but he is also fascinated by the plurality in which that oneness manifests itself: "The celestial oneness that you presuppose," says Daro, "will cause diverse worlds to blossom within you." Dispersion of the being into forms, colors, and vibrations; fusion of all the senses into one. Poetic images are expressions, incarnations at once spiritual and sensual, of that plural and unique rhythm. This manner of seeing, hearing, and feeling the world is generally explained in psychological terms: synaesthesia. An exasperation of the nerves, an upheaval of the psyche. But it is something more: an experience in which the entire being partic.i.p.ates. Poetry of sensations, it has been called; I would prefer poetry that, in spite of its exasperated individualism, affirms the world rather than the poet"s soul. This explains the indifference, at times the open hostility, to Christianity. The world is not fallen, has not been abandoned by G.o.d. It is not a world of perdition: it is inhabited by the spirit; it is the source of poetic inspiration and the archetype of all happening: "Love your rhythm and make rhythm of your actions . . ." The poetry of the Spanish language had never before dared to affirm such a thing, had never seen nature as the dwelling place of the spirit, nor had it seen in rhythm the way, not to salvation, but to reconciliation between man and the cosmos. The libertarian pa.s.sion of our Romantics, their rebellion against "the throne and the altar," are something very different from this vision of the universe in which there is so little place for Christian eschatology and in which the very figure of Christ is only one of the forms in which the Great Cycle manifests itself. The failure of our criticism to examine these beliefs is inexplicable. And, especially in Spain, that same criticism has accused the Modernist poets of superficiality! Modernism began as an aesthetic of rhythm and ended as a rhythmic vision of the universe. Thus it revealed one of the most ancient tendencies of the human psyche, covered up through centuries of Christianity and rationalism. Its revolution was a resurrection. A double discovery: it was the first appearance of the American sensibility in the arena of Hispanic literature; and it made Spanish verse the point of confluence between the ancestral background of American man and European poetry. At the same time it uncovered a buried world and recreated the ties between the Spanish tradition and the modern spirit. And one thing more: this Latin American poetic movement was impregnated with an idea foreign to the Spanish tradition: poetry is a revelation independent of religion. It is the original revelation, the true beginning. That is what modern poetry says, from Romanticism to Surrealism. In this vision of the world reside Modernism"s originality and also its modernity.
Angel, specter, Medusa . . .
Ruben Daro Because of his age, Ruben Daro was the bridge from the initiators to the second Modernist generation; his travels and his generous activities made him the point of connection for the many scattered poets and groups on two continents; he not only inspired and captained the battle, he was also its spectator and its critic-its conscience; and the evolution of his poetry, from Azul [Blue] (1888) to Poema del otoo y otros poemas [Poem of autumn and other poems] (1910), corresponds to the evolution of the movement: it began with him and ended with him. But Daro"s work did not end with Modernism: it surpa.s.sed it, went beyond the language of that school and, in fact, beyond that of any school. It is a creation, something that belongs more to the history of poetry than to the history of styles. Daro was not only the richest and most ample of the Modernist poets: he was also one of our great modern poets. He was the beginning. At times he makes one think of Poe; at other times, of Whitman. Of the first, in that portion of his work in which he scorns th