The Politics of Form: Three Twentieth-Century Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet

Abstract

This article engages the idea of poetic form to create a dialogue among three very different twentieth-century Spanish American poets: Argentine Alfonsina Storni, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Cuban Reinaldo Arenas. Each of them uses the sonnet's privileged position in Western aesthetic tradition to manifest shifting relations to this tradition and to modernity. In this, they open a dialogue with the lettered elite and use part of their cultural inheritance as letrados to confront the old order through an established aesthetic form, to reconfigure or question the opposition between high and low cultural forms to varying degrees and to different ends. These poets resignify their cultural legacy and in the process demonstrate its malleability—the sonnet is not monolithic, but mutable. An invitation to reinvent, the sonnet as employed by these poets embodies a range of intercultural experiences of both continuity and transformation. These readings, which engage with a range of poetic traditions (such as North American New Formalism), reveal how the choice of poetic form both shapes and depends upon the author's and his or her readers' experience and how a particular aesthetic form is both charged and changed by circumstance.