Puerto Rican Poet Research Articles

During depression of 1930s, when labor unrest sparked nationalist literary movements throughout entire Caribbean, Puerto Rico's Julia de Burgos published first book of lyrical poems. Only two others follow.' She died in 1953, at age of thirty-nine, poor, sick, and lonely in immigrant port city of New York. Critics tell us that radical politics, non-traditional lifestyle, and destructive romantic liaisons contributed to alcoholism and to eventual self-estrangement.2 Facing death in final poem, she maintained an ardent faith, nonetheless, that even here.. .in depths of tears and sorrows over this vast empire of solitude and darkness she find the voice of freedom (Sola 158).3 Nearly forty years after tragic death on streets of New York, she is most celebrated of Puerto Rican poets. Her popularity has much to do with ideological consciousness, struggle to free herself from social and literary confinement, to redefine herself, art, and society. In introduction to Julia de Burgos' I Was My Own Route [Yo misma fuf mi ruta], Maria M. Sola opposes autobiographical interpretations of Burgos' self-exploratory poems. Her goal, she writes, was to communicate emotions, not anecdotes from private life. To equate Burgos' poetry with autobiography, Sola argues, would validate myth she had fought against: of a martyr to love, beautiful and talented young woman who gave herself up to alcoholism because one true love abandoned her (10). Although Sola recalls Burgos' thematic fusion of feminism and nationalism, she minimizes desire for artistic legitimacy. Burgos' poems not only explore life's profound meanings, but they also articulate a life's vocation. It is not in recollection of daily events where Burgos signifies self-invention; at heart of autobiographical poetry lies a rhetorical quest to justify a female poetics. Burgos' poems are allegorical constructs that impart, in most intense and profound way, efforts to achieve wholeness by rewriting plots of patriarchal culture. To understand autobiography, one must consider ramifications of writing within two competing patriarchal discourses of colonialism and nationalism. Although women have been involved in shaping political events and have held major political positions in Puerto Rico, they have been underrepresented among playwrights, novelists, essayists, and poets. Diana Velez reminds us that until 1960s, there had been little overtly feminist writing, with some important exceptions such as Luisa Capetillo's work (35). As in all Caribbean societies where writers cannot support themselves and their families through writing and where they depend

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