Guillen as Baroque: Meaning in Motivos de Son

Abstract

The most advanced criticism on Nicolas Guillen has shown that he is not one poet but many.' The monolithic Guillen, chiseled and shaped by official critics and bureaucrats into a monument called The National Poet of Cuba, simply will not do any longer. We are in a phase in which Guillen's work, having all of its moral and political battles behind it, must test itself in the broader arena of modern poetry. Who but the most recalcitrant ideologues would deny that Guillen made manifest the dignity of Afro-Antillean culture through his poetry, or that he eloquently denounced the many injustices to which blacks were and still are subjected? Who but, again, the most recalcitrant and dull-minded ideologues would want to persist in heaping praise on his works for reasons that, though in some ways valid, are not related to their poetic worth? One often hears the name of Guillen alongside those of the major Spanish-American poets of this century (Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Jose Lezama Lima), but one is always left with the impression that his inclusion obeys more a desire to do justice to the marginal to whom he gave a voice than to the conviction that his works are of the highest order. Is Guillen merely an Afro-Cuban poet or simply a poet? Does Guillen need the rhetorical pedestal erected by the State, or can he stand on his own two feet as poet? I would not be writing this essay if I did not believe the latter. Guillen is a major writer as Afro-Antillean poet Afro-Antilleanism being not merely a thematic with sociopolitical relevance but also part of a general poetic revision at the core of modern poetry written in the Spanish language. Guillen's deserved prominence is due to his contribution to this revisionary process, which is as vast as the redefinition of poetry carried out by the English and German Romantics, and which distinguishes the history of Hispanic poetry from that of other Western traditions.2 A central feature of that revision is a return to the Baroque, that is to say, to the work of the major poets of the language, G6ngora, Quevedo, and Calder6n, and to the Baroque aesthetics formulated by Baltasar Gracian.3 The inversion of the concept