3 - Borges and Cardenal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
I have attempted to show that the the mid-twentieth century constituted a watershed in Spanish American poetry. This is confirmed by two more important facts of literary history. The first is that Borges was now about to begin writing a significant amount of poetry again, after having all but abandoned the genre since 1929. The second is that in 1954, the year which saw the first volume of Neruda's Odas and the publication of Parra's Poemas y antipoemas, Ernesto Cardenal began to write his first major poem, Hora O.
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899–1986): Later poetry
Paul Cheselka (1987, 125) writes:
By the time Borges published El Aleph in 1949, he had already thoroughly explored the short story as a vehicle for elaborating and seeking fresh perspectives on his basic themes, and was ready to make poetry his first priority again – poetry would dominate Borges new literary production during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s.
A curious feature of Borges criticism, which Cheselka notes, is that despite dozens of books and more than two thousand relatively recent articles in learned journals, this later poetry has hardly been studied in detail and in fact only a handful of publications deal with it at all. Cheselka rightly criticizes Zunilda Gertel's Borges y su retorno a la poesía (1969) for its inaccuracies, but his own book, though useful, deals exclusively with the thematics of Borges's later collections and has nothing whatever to say about their contents as poetry or about any influence which borges may have exercised on later poets.
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- Spanish American Poetry after 1950Beyond the Vanguard, pp. 44 - 73Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008