Latin American Poetry

Abstract

Very much an aristocratic activity in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, literature turned into a middle-class affair and, by the beginning of the twentieth century discordant, proletarian, and other subaltern strains were beginning to emerge. Perhaps the most original book of avant-garde poetry to have emerged from Latin America is Trilce by the Peruvian César Vallejo. Surrealism produced a new poetic language in Latin America, a composition-in-depth, allowing the hidden elementalism of life to surface within poets' discourse. Stendhal once famously remarked that introducing politics into art is like letting a pistol shot off in the theater. It is clear, however, that many of Latin American's finest poetic moments are built around just such a pistol shot. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was another decisive turning point for the Latin American lyric. Latin American poetry has been traversed by new gendered and new ethnic energies in the modern era.