Yvette Aparicio: Cardenal’s Epigramas: the Self-centered I and exteriorismo

Like many fellow Central American politicized intellectuals, Ernesto Cardenal (Granada, Nicaragua, 1925), poet-priest-militant, was born into a good bourgeois family. His upbringing was equally typical with travel and a university education abroad; as well as with familial and social ties to contemporary literati. But unlike Salvadoran-Nicaraguan Claribel Alegría, for example, whose early poetry has been deemed too bourgeois by critics of political literary texts, Cardenal’s poetic-political renown began early, based on Hora 0 (1960), a retelling and commemoration of recent Nicaraguan history. The oppositional politics of this long poem, written in the 1950s, was joined with the publication in the same year of his novitiate poems, Gethsemani, KY (1960), and together lay the foundation of Cardenal’s poetic persona of political and religious belief and commitment. His subsequent renditions of regional and continental history, for example in El estrecho dudoso (1966) and Homenaje a los indios americanos (1969), as well as his narrative and poetic meditations on revolution in, for instance, En Cuba (1970) and “Canto nacional” (1972) expand the scope of his works’ religious and political tendencies.

But amidst his different interests, poetic content and manipulation of poetic form and rhetoric, a shared characteristic of Cardenal’s texts has been the presence of a visionary voice. This preponderant and controlling I appears early on in Cardenalian poetics; and can be clearly seen in a little-studied text, Epigramas (1961), where an alternately romantic, vain, enraged poetic speaker expresses his love for different women, and his hatred of Somoza and his authoritarian regime. It is the I’s attacks against the dictator that have earned Epigramas its place among political poetry,¹ but in fact the collection is dominated by love poems, as Pailler statistically proves (1981: 110). And whereas Pailler finds that the epigrams’ unity comes from Somoza’s oppressive presence, this article argues that in actuality it is the presence of the I, Poet-lover-sometimes activist, who looms over the text. This poetic speaker, Epigramas’ most common voice, is an egocentric individual preoccupied with his poetic and erotic prowess, or occasional lack thereof; tellingly he is politically unsure but aesthetically confident. In addition to initiating the adventures of a visionary poetic speaker, Epigramas’ I reveals the committed poet’s struggle to divest him/herself of an elitist I, and adopt a more appropriate voice for a politicized speaker who advocates radical social transformation. But despite ideological radicalism, the I that emerges relies on traditional conceptions of the poet’s identity and social function. Thus, this article’s broader focus is the study of how the dominant Cardenalian prophetic poetic voice befits Cardenal’s figure as priest and revolutionary government functionary, but also grates against the inclusiveness, objectivity and openness of his exteriorismo’s precepts.

As William Rowe (2000: 78) accurately notes, most of Cardenal’s critics read his work as an “expression of the experience of conversion—and of other key biographical events […]”. Specifically, critical readers focus on Cardenal’s political and religious activities, for example, his participation in the ill-fated April Conspiracy of 1954 ² and his tenure as Sandinista Minister of Culture as well as his varied religious education, from Kentucky to Colombia, and the founding of Solentiname, his religious community. Thus, from the beginning of his career, the image of the Poet Ernesto Cardenal has been intimately linked to his image as political activist and actor, and as clergyman. This common view echoes Cardenal’s self-fashioning as a Christian and political convert, for example, in La santidad de la revolución,he declares that it was through his religious work that he was revolutionized, “Yo he llegado a la revolución por el evangelio. No fue por la lectura de Marx sino por Cristo. Se puede decir que el evangelio me hizo marxista” (1976: 20). The interpretation of the Solentiname experience is an excellent illustration of this interrelation between the development of a Christian and social consciousness in Cardenalian poetics. As is well-known, in Solentiname Cardenal did not officiate a traditional Catholic mass, instead as a Liberation Theology practitioner, he invited the archipelago’s peasants to discuss the Scriptures with him, as equals. These unorthodox biblical interpretations, El evangelio de Solentiname (1975), along with the inhabitants’ subsequent political activism garnered Cardenal and the community international accolades as well as critiques. For example, in Aesthetics and Revolution: Nicaraguan Poetry 1979-1990 (1993), literary critic Greg Dawes asserts that Solentiname demonstrates peasants’ ability to become conscious of their lowly socioeconomic situation and to resolve to transform it positively. In his study, Dawes posits that for the archipelago’s peasant poets Solentiname prefigured future social change, and that their participation in the 1977 attack on the San Carlos National Guard garrison, “was living testimony of their commitment to something beyond the Solentiname commune itself: socialism” (183). He goes on to argue that the peasants’ collective labor lead them to the development of a “socialist consciousness” and thus to a position of empowerment vis à vis the Somoza regime. For his part, Ernesto Cardenal explains Solentiname’s political transformation and participation in the armed struggle as the result of the inhabitants’ analysis of the Scriptures. Cardenal, then, sees the Solentiname peasants’ evolution into political actors as reflective of his own: a turn towards politics after religious study and conversion.³ At the other end of the political spectrum, Napoleón Chow, a Nicaraguan scholar of comparative religion, questions the capability of Solentiname’s theology, literacy and cultural activities to raise the consciousness of its inhabitants. In Teología de la liberación en crisis: religión, poesía y revolución en Nicaragua (1992), Chow implicitly devalues the peasants’ dialogues by asserting that their published readings are naïve and that they function as a “justificación religiosa por una decisión política predeterminada” (123).⁴ Chow, then, goes on to insinuate that the community’s politicization arose from its isolation and from the figure of Cardenal himself as the “pater-familias” (123). From this oppositional position, Chow’s assertion that the Poet Cardenal, rather than collectivism or critical religiosity, wielded a transformative power over Solentiname’s inhabitants is an important insight to consider in relation to Cardenal’s contention that all Nicaraguan poetry is exteriorist and to the later controversial “conversion” of popular poetry workshops into schools of exteriorismo.

Exteriorismo is intimately tied to Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry specifically, and through him and his aesthetic judgments, to Nicaraguan literary production in general.⁵ Exteriorismo grew out of twin influences: Poundian ⁶ and vanguardia poetics. Of particular importance to Cardenalian poetics is Pound’s (with other Imagists) three poetic principles (1918): “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’” linguistic condensation/concision, and musicality based on the “musical phrase not on the metronome” (1954: 3). Further, Pound’s explanation of the formation of the poetic Image reverberates in the very base of exteriorismo’s manipulation of images of the external world (as opposed to that of sentiment). In his 1915 essay, “Affirmations: As for Imagisme,” Pound posits that the Image is formed subjectively and objectively,

It can arise in the mind. It is then ‘subjective.’ External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original. (1973: 374-375)

For Cardenalian poetry, the significance of Pound’s rendition of the formation of poetic images lies in its separation of the adulterated, subjective image from the more “accurate,” objective image; and in his assertion of the possibility of re-creating the “original” in a poetic text. The “external original” translates to the attempt to reproduce poetically, an unadorned empirical reality, to produce texts that are “austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (1954: 12). But the most influential of Pound’s poetic theories on Cardenal’s works are: the exploitation of the ideogram or the juxtaposition of images to create more complex ones; the union of the poetic and narrative ⁷ genres; and the importance given to verses’ audibility. But as Cardenal realizes, Pound’s fundamental influence on exteriorist poetry is his call to include all aspects of daily life in poetry, in other words, to expand the definition of “good” poetry, Cardenal affirms: “Pound pues abrió los límites de la poesía, de manera que en ella cabe todo lo que se puede expresar con el lenguaje” (1970: 176). As Tamara Williams argues, Cardenal also learned from Pound the desire to challenge and renew literary convention, through the use of the Canto for example, “The Nicaraguan author was profoundly committed to Pound’s idea of the Canto as a literary manifestation of a larger project that sought radical renewal of poetry through a redefinition of its conventional thematic, discursive, and generic boundaries” (1992: 44). In addition, Pound’s insistence on the possibility of objectively recreating an image in poetry provides exteriorist juxtapositions and narratives with an aura of truth, clearly an important characteristic for political, as well as religious, texts.⁸

Exteriorismo intends to integrate concrete objects and lived experience, using narrative and filmic techniques, in objective, inclusive poems. All these characteristics join to build an effective political tool that can reach a mass audience deemed alienated from traditional lyric poetry and its exclusive conventional language. But the implied simplicity of the verbal montages created by Cardenal is relative because his texts are not completely immune to the use of rhetorical language and because his readers must be competent enough to understand his verbal montages. Roberto Fernández Retamar senses this problem and inadvertently questions exteriorismo’s political efficacy as he simultaneously confirms Cardenal’s commitment to literature’s utilitarianism,

[the juxtaposition of images has been] una manera de revelar determinados hechos, y eventualmente de combatirlos, a partir de materiales que el lector debe conocer, al menos en parte, aunque él no llegue nunca a las dificultades de Pound. [. . .] Pero ese “exteriorismo”, como se ve con toda claridad precisamente en el montaje de la imágenes cinematográficas, no se ofrece sin más, pues implica la contraposición de dos imágenes (una de la cuales, en poesía puede no estar explícita, pero de alguna manera debe ser conocida por quien lee) para que aparezca un tercer elemento en el lector, que está así obligado a abandonar su papel pasivo, ante una genuina obra abierta. (1982: 46)

If the reader is unable to form a unified, legible vision of exteriorist verbal collages, he or she is excluded from the reception of texts’ messages, be they political or not. In other words, the integration of colloquial language, of legendary historical and popular figures (e.g. Sandino or Marilyn Monroe), of local flora and fauna, etc, does not automatically produce an unsophisticated, easily comprehensible poetic text no matter the poet’s political intentions.

The poet Cardenal’s exteriorismo, a post-vanguardia aesthetic, has come to stand for politicized poetry and for Nicaraguan letters in general. The role of Nicaraguan Poet and the classification of poetry produced in Nicaragua as exteriorist did not arise external to Cardenal’s own figuration either before or after being Sandinista Minister of Culture. For example, he exhibits his cultivation of exteriorismo’s status as a collective, national aesthetic in his introduction to his Poesía nueva de Nicaragua, “También en esta antología se ha procurado hacer resaltar la principal tendencia de la poesía nicaragüense que es la exteriorista. “Exteriorismo” es una palabra creada en Nicaragua para designar el tipo de poesía que nosotros preferimos” (1974: 9). With this definition, as with his interpretation of Solentiname’s politicization, Cardenal effectively links his personal evolution towards political poetic praxis to a now national, innovative aesthetic. Earlier in an interview with Mario Benedetti during his visit to Havana, Cardenal had gone farther naming exteriorismo “revolutionary,” “Y naturalmente toda poesía social y política y económica, y toda buena poesía revolucionaria tiene necesariamente que ser exteriorista” (182). While his belief in his aesthetic demonstrates his social commitment, it also allows a glimpse of a strong poetic voice that can be read as domineering. Through such self and nationalistic imaginings does Cardenal rhetorically nationalize and revolutionize his poetic practices and thereby consolidates his position of dominance in Nicaraguan, and Leftist, literatures.

Cardenal’s self-inscription as a Nicaraguan cultural producer and his interest in sociohistorical poetic reconstructions help his texts resist decontextualized readings and thus impel the reader to interpret his poems only within the confines of their specific contexts. Cardenal’s cultural position transforms itself throughout his poetic trajectory to finally evolve into that of the Poet Cardenal, militant poet-prophet. And with the Sandinista triumph, his texts subsume technical, historical, and spiritual concerns under the needs of the new regime and maintain visionary, prophetic poetic speakers. In addition, and perhaps paradoxically, Cardenal’s exteriorismo as an aesthetic, not political,⁹ choice, with its emphasis on objects, not ideas and on inclusiveness, gives way to a post-revolutionary poetry that verges on propaganda.¹⁰ The double movement between the elitist conception of the poet as visionary and that of the poet as revolutionary actor crystallizes once the Poet has committed to Sandinismo, but it begins to develop in earlier works.

Cardenal’s poetic-ideological evolution, his increasing production of political texts and decreasing innovation, is similar to Pablo Neruda’s. Cardenal, like Neruda before him, attempts to transform his poetry into a political, historical instrument of radical social change, while retaining poetic Is in positions of superiority over possible readers. In Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy, Enrico Mario Santí specifically explores Neruda’s use of a “visionary mode.” He defines prophecy as speech that is emitted “on behalf of someone or something, be it an inspiring god, nation or muse. The prophet is the one who speaks, yet his speech derives its authority not from an inner reservoir, but from an outside and sometimes alien source” (1982: 15-16). The poet-prophet, by extension, possesses linguistic power that may not originate in him for he echoes “phantoms of earlier ‘discoveries’” (16), nevertheless his prophecy “embodies a language of authenticity not only summoning men to abide by the principles of their faith, but in doing so with the weight of tradition and with a charged discourse that strips the fictions of innovation” (17). As does Neruda, Cardenal manipulates the poetic tradition of the poet-prophet for political purposes. In comparing Neruda’s Canto general (1950) and Cardenal’s El estrecho dudoso (1966) one finds that they differ greatly stylistically, the former structured uniformally and the latter consisting of a collage, but that both poets exploit a prophetic visionary poetic voice. In the words of Tamara Williams, “unlike others, this poem—conceived and produced following Cardenal’s religious conversion—would reflect a providential vision of history as a medium of God’s work and revelation” (1995: xii). And although El estrecho dudoso is a polyphonic text which lacks, as Williams asserts, “an authorial point of view” (xiv), its focus on two “messianic hero[es]” (xxxiii) can be seen to function as the projection of a dominating Cardenalian I. The longevity of this “I” in the Nicaraguan’s poetry beguiles and nuances his adherence and promotion of exteriorismo, an all-embracing aesthetic. Finally, the poetic persona’s figuration as a prophet informs this poetry not only as a rhetorical and political ploy of the poetic speaker, it is also integral to Ernesto Cardenal’s real-life identity (poet, religious leader, and sometimes political figure).

In his pre-religious conversion poems, the poetic voice already speaks from a subject position of knowledge and power that rises above the “you,” whether the “you” is a loved one or the detested dictator and whether the tone is loving or ironic. This early development is apparent in Epigramas, a collection of epigrams that predominantly narrate the mostly failed romantic, and political, adventures of a young poet. The epigrammatic form and the thematic core of heterosexual love ¹¹ differentiate this collection from the rest of Cardenal’s literary projects.¹² And although Epigramas demonstrate the beginning of what will become an identifiably Cardenalian aesthetic, it has been little studied.¹³

Two critics who have written about this 1961 text, Claire Pailler and Ariel Dorfman, speculate about why it has merited less critical attention than other texts by Cardenal. Each critic arrives at different conclusions, but they agree that the reason may lie in the break from Cardenal’s poetic trajectory the collection effects. For her part, Pailler posits that the epigrams’ value is obscured by the current (1981) urgent need for political poetic texts, she writes, “L’urgence de la tâche révolutionaire, les grands chants d’une voix prophetique, font oublier quelque peu les pièces brèves, brûlantes, qui pourtant avaient été la première arme du poète combattant” (99). Pailler’s lament that critics have not realized that Cardenal’s epigrams are also fervent and that they too can be useful even though they lack the grandiosity of his “grands chants” demonstrates the overarching power of politics in assessments of Cardenal’s poety. Similarly, Dorfman, in his close readings of the complete collection, theorizes that Epigramas’ laic origins exclude it from critical analyses (1984: 221). But in an earlier reading, Dorfman incisively comments that the epigrams fit too well into conventional conceptions of poetry,¹⁴ and thus the bourgeois reader can ignore Cardenal’s politics and enjoy their art. He charges, “Siempre la misma burguesía, tratando de escindir al hombre: se puede disfrutar de la hermosura que crea Cardenal sin comulgar con su posición política, se puede leer epigramas cómodamente en un sillón mientras la dictadura nicaragüense espera la ocasión (como el terremoto del año 1972) para liquidar al autor de los epigramas” (1974: 194). Dorfman pinpoints the facility with which Cardenal’s poems can read as unurgent, not burning with Pailler’s “tâche révolutionaire.” They are enjoyable poems whose political context and sometimes content can be eluded by the typical poetry reader. Dorfman’s attack on the leisurely reading practices of the middle class implicitly contrasts Cardenal’s early readers to his later politically committed public. It also echoes Fernández Retamar’s contention of the need for an active reader (46), one whose reading goes beyond sitting in an armchair to simply enjoy his/her leisure time.¹⁵ And what is more, it intimates the transformation of the Cardenalian reader from his contemporaneous not necessarily socially conscious reader to like-thinking political opponents of imperialism and the Somoza dynasty or at least to readers at the cusp of a consciousness change. The differences between Epigramas’ and his more explicitly political texts’ readers make possible the viewing of changes in Cardenal’s poetic persona. For it is precisely in the epigrams’ ideological and poetic indecisiveness that the Poet and his oeuvre become more difficult to pigeonhole, to read unambiguously.

The epigram, a classical poetic form, is a fortuitous avenue for poetry attempting to offer social critique. Its brevity, lack of linguistic ornament, satiric representation and sarcastic tone aptly contain a young Cardenal’s views of love, literature and politics and his wrath against his lovers’ inattention and Somoza’s cruelty. At the same time, Cardenal’s original epigrams insert his, and thus Nicaraguan, poetry into Western tradition while his translations of Catullus (84 BC-54 BC) and Martial (38 AD-103 AD) demonstrate his classical education.¹⁶ Both sets of texts display Cardenal’s control of poetic form and rhetoric, and his departure from Rubén Darío’s and the vanguardia’s poetics by delving into a classical tradition new to his literary context. Likewise their removal from later editions seems to be an attempt to distance Cardenal, defined for many by his leftist politics, from his education, and thus social class, and to foreground the “Nicaraguanness” of his poetic output. In fact, in avant-gardist Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s oft-cited judgment, Cardenal’s epigrams evidence a new poetic identity in Nicaraguan letters. For Cuadra, Cardenal represents his generation’s “epigrammatic attitude” towards “un mundo hostil y cerrado al que hay que atacar y del cual hay que defenderse colocando en la poesía el aguijón, el arma enconada que permite atacar lo monstruoso desde la pequeñez” (1971: 13). This aesthetic transformation in Nicaraguan poetry that Cuadra perceives legitimates the instrumentation of linguistic arms to fight an oppressive system. At the same time, his comment frees post-vanguardia, pre-revolutionary Nicaraguan poets from conceptions of poetry that would exclude oppositional poetic texts from the realm of “real,” or literarily valuable, poetry.¹⁷ Opening up the poetic genre and affirming the possibility of concealing poetry’s assaults in linguistic “spurs” makes it viable to situate Epigramas, a text with hidden weapons, alongside the overtly political Hora 0. And in fact, the epigrams’ political diatribes and exteriorist tendencies (including the use of local history, slogans, proper and brand names) connect it to other poetry collections produced by Cardenal in the same time period while its love poems’ goal of sexual seduction distance it from those same texts.

Epigramas’ I searches for an elusive love that he is unable to capture no matter his desirability or his (assured) future greatness as a writer of verse. Unlike the poetic Is of Cardenal’s best-known texts, the epigrams’ lovelorn poetic speakers are not moved by biblical, fraternal love, by the urge to “correct” history, nor by the desire to politicize and transform society, but rather by an individualistic romantic love. Cardenal’s frustrated lover alternates with the poet-visionary and finally the poet-political activist, both of which dominate later works.

The collection’s opening poem introduces its major themes: romantic love, the I’s literary posterity and the effectiveness and power of vengeance (an important motivator of later political harangues). In the first epigram, dedicated to “Claudia,” one of three named lovers, the poetic I proclaims his poetic and romantic superiority,

The I’s gift of this epigram to the you initiates an unequal relationship between the poetic voice who wields linguistic power and the lover, the silent recipient of his art. The poetic speaker grants the lover ownership of the poem (1), but it is he who really possesses these verses that are so simply written that even “Claudia” will understand their meaning and that are also an aesthetic object that will be appreciated by other lovers, independent of the poet’s or the lover’s existence. The poetic speaker is certain of the literary value of his simple poetry, as he implicitly is of his ability to write “difficult” verses if he so desires, and of his assured failure at seduction. In the poem’s last four lines the poetic speaker confesses his certainty, by not expressing doubt after “tal vez” and affirming his future-past failure, “no despertó” (10), in which “Claudia” will not respond in kind. Thus, the poetic I will only succeed when his poem seduces other lovers. But his eventual reward for poetic skill does not only entail the attainment of a readership, it also intimates his control over “Claudia”’s representation: this control will avenge her certain rejection of his romantic advances. In other words, despite her rejection, he will have the last word. In his close reading of epigram one, Ariel Dorfman also notes the poetic speaker’s exercise of a “prophetic vision,” he explains, “[. . .] el yo anticipa su derrota en un hoy que ya es ayer, el yo proclama su victoria vicariamente a través de estos enamorados mañana. El rigor de su visión profética reside en la lenta certeza de lo que se cumplirá; su debilidad es que a los profetas nadie los sabe escuchar hoy” (1984: 225). Dorfman, though, too easily accepts the truth of the poetic speaker’s certain victory and vengeance. His interpretation of the I’s posturing does not question the one-sided nature of the poem’s love nor does it take into consideration that this prophecy is limited to an interpersonal relationship whose success or failure is only of consequence to the I. The first epigram’s prophecy is not as magnanimous as Dorfman implies, for it functions as a self-aggrandizing tool for the poetic speaker, a manner in which to minimize the importance of “Claudia”’s rejection of his love and to project towards a fruitful literary career.

The poem collection’s first epigram, then, initiates the construction of a poetic speaker whose supposed motivations to love, to write and finally to combat the regime, unmentioned as of yet, are ambivalent. The I places “Claudia” in the center of his text by declaring her the owner of his verses, and of his love, but she actually operates as a sounding board for his musings about the power of poetry. His decision to write poetry simply shows his understanding that this linguistic choice is not limited to “Claudia”’s seduction, that it can also guarantee him future Spanish American readers; thus, revealing that the I bases his belief in poetry on its utility in love and seduction. This insistence contradicts Cardenal’s statements about his poetry’s goals. In a 1970 interview, for example, he does not mock readers’ competence, rather he avows that “He tratado siempre de hacer una poesía que no sea hermética, ni oscura ni difícil; que llegue al pueblo” (180). “El pueblo” replaces Epigramas’ lovers as the audience of the requisite (outward) simplicity of his aesthetic. This substitution speaks of Cardenal’s religious and political conversions and to the attitude of superiority, not necessarily malicious, of his epigrams’ poetic speakers. The I remains in control of the text, implicitly choosing one aesthetic over another, simplicity over ornateness (baroqueness), and in epigram one, not yet attaching a political meaning to his poetics.¹⁸

His epigrams express both his erotic and political frustrations, but his attacks on the “you”-lover and the “you”-Somoza do not share the same tenor or posture. When he verbally assaults the recalcitrant lover, he takes on an offensive position pointing out her inadequacies and his superiority while his attacks on Somoza are launched more defensively. In addition to taking diverse tactical positions in his interactions with this lover and the regime, he merges them together, for example with the use of the ambiguous “tú” in the fourteenth and fifteenth epigrams, and by drawing comparisons between the two. This second strategy historicizes the I’s romantic relationships and personalizes his confrontations with the dictatorship. Consequently he situates his love relationships within the confines of authoritarianism and their success or failure becomes dependent on his reaction to Somoza. The poetic I first intermingles these two preoccupations in epigram eight, prior to speaking Somoza’s name (in “Imitación a Propercio”),

In this epigram, which follows his threat that the lover will read poems dedicated to her without knowing she is their intended receptor and precedes the you’s sale in marriage, the I begins to lend his literary talents to a cause that transcends romantic conquests. But politics enter into the I’s poetic production through the back door: his inability to retain the you’s love pushes him out of his personal world and onto the regime’s path.¹⁹ Rather than confront the you for preferring another man over him, he directs his anger at a much stronger adversary, the Government. In the context of the poem, the poetic speaker’s anti-government article is relegated to the sphere of jilted love. It presents the speaker as a coward at love who “acts out” against authority without political conviction; the I does not communicate what his article protests. It is clear, though, that gossip about the you drives him to seek seclusion in his room and then to journalistic writing. And whereas the literary effects of his threats to the lover must await the passage of time, the anti-government article’s outcome is quick. Ironically for the poet speaker, his poetry is not always effective as a seduction tool, meanwhile his non-literary work attains him “fame” landing him in prison. The government seems to take the I’s threats more seriously than the lover does and his imprisonment for presumably inflammatory writing makes apparent his political context of dictatorship. Not knowing the nature of the I’s protest, the punishment the government metes out to him can be read as an overreaction for a tantrum by a bad government reader and as appropriate to the perceived crime of inciting anti-government actions. In the first case, the government feels threatened by the article, not recognizing its inauthentic birth, whereas in the second, the government correctly estimates the real danger posed by the author. The article born out of anger because of the loss of love evidences how the poetic “I”’s sentimental life can push him outside of his inner world; how political activism can begin. At the same time, this rebound activism problematizes a purely affirmative reading of the poem’s commitment to anti-government activities.

The poetic speaker’s sense of political commitment and of effective oppositional response continues to develop in the eleventh epigram. Instead of retreating into his room, in this epigram the poetic speaker becomes an active political agent and, thus, a target for the feared National Guard,

In the first three lines the poetic speaker expands his political use of language by adding his voice to his pen in opposition to the regime. The I’s message in the eighth epigram is limited by being a written document in a nation of great illiteracy but when he adds his voice to the propagation of his viewpoint, he gets closer to the daily communication of the majority. In addition, to display his advancement to more efficient political demonstrations of commitment (written and verbal defiance here), the I also claims participation in a smaller but more dangerous and daring endeavor, a direct attack on the regime’s power, the April Conspiracy. This revelation indicates his ability to move between activities against Somoza and his cronies (for example, in epigrams against money); and of the I’s integration into a cadre of opposition (a move similar to epigram fourteen’s use of “nosotros”). Yet even the union with other rebels and the National Guard’s power, like his jail stint, do not compare to the emotions and reactions the lover awakens in him. The implicit bravery of the second half of the epigram is weakened by the I’s recognition of his fraility for the lover. The desired woman’s replacement of the regime and its repressive apparatuses as the bane of the I’s well-being makes the reader re-evaluate the I’s politicization.²⁰ Although four of the poem’s six verses refer to subversive political acts, the lover’s image in the last two lines menaces the meaning of its first lines. The I’s reaction to the you is present and constant, “palidezco,” “paso,” “me hace temblar,” but the political has already occurred and is complete, “he repartido” and “participé,” And while the first line’s “he repartido” promises to recur, it does not contain the weight of constancy and regularity of “palidezco cuando paso”. The poetic speaker’s paleness and trembling exemplify her physical and mental influence over him. Unreciprocated love, then, overrides political intention. In brief, the enamored poetic speaker allows her into the political sphere, muting his commitment, and endowing her with poetic, but not political, centrality.

The I’s competing desires (sentimental and political) and the tension they ensue in him is detailed in the thirty-fifth epigram where he demonstrates the Somoza regime’s hold on its citizens’ everyday lives. In an inversion of the eleventh epigram’s structure, in this poem the poetic I dreams of his future and is interrupted by the figure of Somoza,

The repeated use of the adverbial conjunction “tal vez” followed by the subjunctive to introduce the I’s wishes gives them an air of improbability. In addition, the listing of his romantic and literary dreams together with his anti-somocismo insinuates their equal footing in his mind. This equalization of personal and social urges admirably connects the personal and political, but the grammatical structures place them on hold, for the poetic speaker does not postulate himself or anyone else as an agent of change or progress. Instead, he passively hopes for the publication of his work, “Y tal vez se publique” (3), and for Somoza to spontaneously fall (6). Likewise, the apparently random list of five life possibilities constructs an uncertain, vacillating poetic speaker, who shares his preoccupations only with intimates, “amor mío,” within the confines of a romantic relationship that is itself contained within a repressive political system represented by Somoza’s name, thus closing off the poem and its desires.

Like the thirty-fifth poem, the fortieth is directed at an intimate, “amor mío,” and further explores the all-encompassing power of the Somoza dictatorship. Unlike the previous epigram, this one attacks Somoza’s regime without naming him. Its critique is more abstract focusing on a sinister plural “you” who corrupts “las palabras del pueblo” (7),

The effectiveness of the poetic speaker’s question, “¿No has leído, amor mío […]” (1), and the comprehension of his response, and thus of his critique, depends on readers’ ability to get beyond a literal understanding of the poem because its “bite” relies on its sarcastic tone, on its ironic listing of contradictory, and presumably, untrue epiteths. In order for the poem to be activated as a politically critical text, Novedades’ description of the nation’s model head of state and its reportage must be mistrusted. In addition, the media’s subservience to the dictatorship is intensified by Novedades’ incapacity to use language effectively against the dictator. Whereas the poetic speaker has been jailed for writing against the government, for not “falsifying the people’s language” (7), Novedades deepens the regime’s plundering of the people by taking from it its words. In effect, epigram forty’s villain, a plural, unpersonalized you, robs the populace of its perception of reality. The image of the dictator the media promulgates wholly negates the majority’s life experience and invalidates its daily (colloquial) language.

The poetic speaker closes the epigram by implying that his usage of language opposes that of Novedades and of the Somoza regime, “Por eso son importantes mis poemas de amor” (9). It could be said that his rejection of Novedades’ image production is a rejection of propagandistic texts, but this view does not take into account the role of literary rhetoric in this and other political and non-political epigrams. And it does not consider Epigramas’ own self-serving linguistic manipulation particularly in love poems (for instance in the second epigram). In addition, the inclusion of the propaganda poeticizes it just as it familiarizes the epigram’s literariness. Ultimately epigram forty is not about things or objects as required by exteriorism, but about ideas.²¹ It is about the power of language to construct and change reality whether negatively or positively. Clearly the poetic speaker believes that his love poetry functions as an antidote for falsified language.²² As an antidote, his linguistic manipulation is a true or legitimate use of everyday language. Hence besides criticizing the media’s abuse of language and its kowtowing to the dictatorship, epigram forty also authorizes Epigramas’ romanticism, its use of poetry to attain a love object. The poetic speaker’s difference from other users of the “people’s language” also confirms the literary and social value of his (love) poetry while simulataneously manifesting his struggles to attain both poetic and political relevancy.

The thirty-second epigram, which is titled “Epitafio a Joaquín Pasos”²³ in later editions of Epigramas, details the life and posterity of such a successful language “purifier,” a poet,

Parallel to the poetic I, this poet wanders the street, anonymous to mainstream society, suffers imprisonment (for an undisclosed cause), and works only as a poet (1-5). But unlike the I-poet, his success is not measured by literary production. The I laments the poet’s death and obscurity but this sentiment soon gives way to glad prophecy of future glory. “Pero” presents the poem’s second half’s contradictory relation to the first seven lines.²⁴ Instead of rising to fame and enduring through a popular or learned readership,²⁵ his presence will be felt via infrastructural and governmental transformations. His manipulation of practical, everyday language in poetic texts, a stated goal of exteriorism, will restore purity to the “people’s words” (epigram forty) and will also invigorate the poet’s social position, granting him social significance without requiring the abandonment of poetic production.²⁶ In other words, the often-cited “Porque purificó en sus poemas el lenguaje de su pueblo” (12) recuperates language as the place of the poet’s (social) usefulness.²⁷ This poetic social role also situates the poet on a higher plane, beyond others’ linguistic ability. He becomes a poetic prophet whose leadership of his “people,” is easy to miss despite its fundamentality to social progress. This shift in the poet’s positionality from being read by other bohemian outsiders to infiltrating others’ everyday life converts him into a figure who is committed to and engaged with the well-being of his compatriots. Thus, through the assertion of poetry’s linguistic character, the poetic speaker argues for the social importance of poetic producers as defenders of a pure, but colloquial, language and subsequently as integral to social change.

With Epigramas’ poetic speaker, Cardenal begins to construct what will eventually be his secular-religious poet-prophet “I.” The creation of this persona, despite its ideological radicalism, relies on traditional conceptions of the poet’s identity and function in bourgeois society. In fact, the “I”’s struggles with his dueling preoccupations, love and politics, are poeticized mostly from subjectivist, individualistic perspectives. As Alfredo Veiravé maintains, “Podríamos adelantar que aquel nosotros-ellos que, posteriormente, connotará una poesía totalizadora e integradora de lo social frente a los otros, en una pluralidad nacional o latinoamericana, comienza por el desvío de una conciencia individualista” (1975: 67). Epigramas’ poetic subjectivity jars accepted views of Cardenal’s poetic production and its (unquestioned) revolutionariness, but its elision simplifies this poetry’s significance to later texts. While it is true that the romantic love epigrams are an anomaly in Cardenal’s oeuvre, their diverse egocentric, enamored and indignant poetic speakers endure in transformed forms. For example in the sixteenth poem of Gethsemani, KY (1960),²⁸ the poetic speaker confesses his inability to focus on prayer during the matins and lauds, “Y mientras recitamos los salmos, mis recuerdos / interfieren el rezo como radios y roconolas” (6-7); his mind’s straying is emphasized by the repetition of a psalmic verse “Y mi pecado siempre está delante de mí” (5, 18):

Somoza’s intrusion into the poetic speaker’s prayers reiterates the epigrams’ contention that the dictator pervades even the most intimate aspects of Nicaraguan’s lives. This interruption also demonstrates that his political preoccupations overwhelm him and hinder his meditative work.

In his epigrams’ tirades, the poetic speaker joins together his various enemies into one image, in particular the obstinate lover and Somoza. Similarly in this Gethsemany poem, he merges Somoza and Caiphas, the high priest who presided over the assembly that crucified Jesus Christ,

The poetic speaker’s knowledge of Somoza’s corruption and cruelty prevent him from departing from material life and entering into contemplation and a more intimate relationship with God (Urdanivia Bertarelli, 1984: 99).²⁹ Even in this religion-inflected text, the poetic speaker’s presence as poetic subject dominates, keeping him, as he mentally returns to Somoza’s Nicaragua and earthly temptations, as the thematic and formal center of the poem. Further, the I reproaches the order for attempting to separate its adherents from the wider world, “Y la iglesia está helada, como llena de demonios, / mientras seguimos en la noche recitando los salmos” (31-32). While the I’s frustration can be read as a natural early reaction to Gethsemany’s regiment, the insertion of material life in a poem about a novitiate also displays the I’s aesthetic strategy, exteriorismo. The poetic speaker’s failure to consciously leave behind the material world also demonstrates his overpowering urge to maintain his subjectivity as well as the importance of daily life and its objects in his experience of empirical reality. Simultaneously, the omnipresence of the poetic speaker’s I contradicts exteriorism’s desire for the poetic communication of externality rather than interiority.

In short, beginning with Epigramas’ love-political poems, the Cardenalian I travels among diverse poetic content centered on an identifiable, centralized I. Cardenal’s early epigrams present the duality of love and politics that lies at the core of much of his poetic production. The obvious difference between the 1961 text and later collections is the way the duality is defined: romantic love, mystical love, fraternal love, nationalism, Marxism, Sandinismo. And whereas Epigramas’ poetic speaker enjoys mobility between lovers (e.g. Claudia, Myriam, Ilieana and other unnamed women) and between politically useful activities (e.g. writing anti-government articles and participating in the April Conspiracy), later sociohistorical events will result in more strident political and literary positions. But his integration into ideologies and institutions focused on the collectivity does not do away with the young poet-visionary of the epigrams. Prior to his decision to officially join the FSLN, Cardenal was asked at Solentiname why he did not participate more actively in the revolutionary process. His answer is enlightening not only because of his posterior position as Minister of Culture but also because it reveals his conscious cultivation of the poet-visionary role, “Bueno, creo que cada uno tiene una misión. La mía es la de poeta y la de profeta, y no la de líder político y tampoco la de profesor. Y creo que cada uno debe luchar por la liberación dentro de su vocación” (Cardenal, 1976: 21). His last comment also recalls epigram thirty-two’s assertion that the poet can be a transformative agent as a poet. Ernesto Cardenal, then, shares his vocation of poet with the poetic speakers who populate his poems and who live as Poets and Prophets well aware of their individual linguistic and visionary prowess even as they call for a collective aesthetic and social transformation.

Acosta, Luz Marina, 2000: La obra primigenia de Ernesto Cardenal (Carmen y otros poemas). Managua: anamá ediciones.

Aparicio, Yvette, 2004: “Poesía nicaragüense escrita después de Darío, de Cardenal, de la Revolución” in: Daniel Balderston, et al (eds.), Literatura y otras artes en América Latina: Actas del XXXIV Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana., Iowa City, IA: University of IA, 151-157.

Arellano, Jorge Eduardo, 1974: “Ernesto Cardenal: De Granada a Gethsemany (1925-1957),” in: Cuadernos hispanoamericanos: revista mensual de cultura hispánica (Madrid), 289-290: 163-183.

Beverley, John/Marc Zimmerman, 1990: Literatura and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press.

-----, 1970: “Ernesto Cardenal: Evangelio y revolución.” By Mario Benedetti, in: Casa de las Américas, 63: 174-183.

-----, 1978: “Lo que fue Solentiname (Carta al pueblo de Nicaragua),” in: Casa de las Américas, 108: 158-160.

-----, 1974: “Prólogo.” Poesía nueva de Nicaragua. Buenos Aires & Mexico: Ediciones Carlos Lohlé.

Chow, Napoleón. Teología de la liberación en crisis: religión, poesía y revolución en Nicaragua. Managua: Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1992.

Cortés Tovar, Rosario, 2000: “Tradición clásica en Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal,” in: Exemplaria (Universidad de Huelva), 4: 211-226.

Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, 1971: “Prólogo,” by Ernesto Cardenal, in: Antología. Buenos Aires & Mexico: Ediciones Carlos Lohlé, 9-22.

Dawes, Greg, 1993: Aesthetics and Revolution: Nicaraguan Poetry 1979-1990. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Daydí-Tolson, Santiago, Autumn 1984: “Ernesto Cardenal: Resonancia e ideología en el discurso lírico hispanoamericano,” in: Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, IX: 1: 17-29.

Dorfman, Ariel, 1974: “Ernesto Cardenal: ¡Todo el poder a Dios-proletariado!,” in: Ensayos quemados en Chile: (inocencia y neocolonialismo), Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 193-223.

-----, 1984: “Tiempo de amor, tiempo de lucha: la unidad en los Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal,” in: Hacia la liberación del lector latinoamericano. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 221-286.

Farias, Víctor, 1981: “La poesía de Ernesto Cardenal: historia y trascendencia,” in: Arauca de Chile, 15: 101-118.

Fernández Retamar, Roberto, Sept.-Oct. 1982: “Prólogo a Ernesto Cardenal,” in: Casa de las Américas, 134: 40-47.

Fraile, Isabel, 1976: “Pound and Cardenal,” in: Review (Center for Inter-American Relations), 18: 36-42.

Gibbons, Reginald, 1987: “Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal,” in: Critical Inquiry, 13.3: 648-671.

Livingstone, Dinah, 1993: “Introduction,” in: Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution: An Anthology. London: Katabasis, 1-18.

Magunagoicoechea, Juan P., 1979: “Iniciación poética en los Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal,” in: Káñina, 91-104.

Oviedo, José Miguel, October 1968: “Ernesto Cardenal: un místico comprometido,” in Imagen: Quincenario de arte, literatura e información cultural, 35: n.p..

Pailler, Claire, 1981: “Ernesto Cardenal, épigrammes romaines, épigrammes nicaraguayennes: fragments d’une autobiographie poétique,” in: Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-bresilien (Caravelle), 36: 99-120.

-----, 1973: “Affirmations: As for Imagisme,” in William Cookson, Selected Prose. New York: New Directions, 374-377.

-----, 1954: “A Retrospect,” in: T.S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, Ltd, 3-14.

Randall, Margaret, 1984: Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers. San Francisco, CA: Solidarity Publications.

Rowe, William, 2000: Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Ruiz Sánchez, Marcos, 2000: “Los Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal: renovación de un género,” in: Exemplaria (Universidad de Huelva), 4: 165-186.

Santí, Enrico Mario, 1982: Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy. London & Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Sobalvarro, Juan, 1997: “Las mentiras del exteriorismo,” in: 400 Elefantes, 2.7: 21-25.

-----, 1999: “Las verdades del exteriorismo,” in: 400 Elefantes, 3.9: 21-25.

Urdanivia Bertarelli, 1984 : La poesía de Ernesto Cardenal: cristianismo y revolución. Lima: Latinoamericana Editores.

Valdés, Jorge H., 1987: “Cardenal’s Exteriorismo: the Ideology Underlying the Esthetic,” in: Mid-Hudson Language Studies, 10: 63-70.

Veiravé, Alfredo, 1975: “Ernesto Cardenal: el exteriorismo, poesía del nuevo mundo,” in: José Promis Ojeda, et al. (eds.), Ernesto Cardenal: poeta de la liberación latinoamericana, Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro, 61-106.

Williams, Tamara, 1995: “Introduction,” in: Ernesto Cardenal & trans. John Lyons, The Doubtful Strait/El estrecho dudoso, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, vii-xxxi.

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vuelve 1. In his 1968 “Ernesto Cardenal: un místico comprometido,” José Miguel Oviedo establishes a three-pronged vision of Cardenal’s poetics. The three thematic threads he identifies are politics, religion and history. While these thematic tendencies effectively describe Cardenal’s poetic production, its repetition by later studies disallows analyses of nuanced conflicts within the categories and other themes.

vuelve 2. See Jorge Eduardo Arellano’s “Ernesto Cardenal: de Granada a Gethemany (1925-1927)” and Cardenal’s interview with Margaret Randall in Risking a Somersault in the Air for details about the poet’s involvement in this political action

vuelve 3. In En Cuba (1972), Cardenal details his political, second, “conversion,” after his visit to Cuba in 1970. See “Lo que fue Solentiname” (1978) for Cardenal’s reaction to the destruction of Solentiname.

vuelve 4. In an interesting parallel, Reginald Gibbons makes a similar charge of Cardenal’s aesthetic, finding that exteriorismo is a convenient manner for him to package his political views. To Gibbons, Cardenal’s exteriorismo “looks like an attempt to find a poetic principle that would disallow the kind of language that was characteristic of, or acquiescent to, political and commercial powers” (1987: 655).

vuelve 5. See younger poets’ response to exteriorismo’s dominance in current Nicaraguan literary production in Juan Sobalvarro’s “Las mentiras del exteriorismo” (1997) and “Las verdades del exteriorismo” (1999). For a commentary on poetic responses to this predominance, see “Poesía nicaragüense escrita después de Darío, de Cardenal, de la Revolución” (Aparicio, 2004).

vuelve 6. See Isabel Fraire’s “Pound and Cardenal” (1976) for a detailed, lucid analysis of Cardenal’s appropriation of Poundian poetics.

vuelve 7. In “Affirmations,” Pound blurs the generic differences between poetry and prose, stating that verse should be “at least as well written as good prose” (375).

vuelve 8. Also significant for Cardenal’s poetry is the U.S. poet’s view of the social responsibility of more “able” writers, those who are linguistically “efficient,” “accurate,” and “clear,” irrespective of their ideologies, “Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportionate to their ability AS WRITERS” (1971: 32). In Nicaraguan literary history, writers’ social function has been a nationalist concern. Paralleling their U.S. counterparts Pound and T.S. Eliot, vanguardia poets believed that in order for the Nicaraguan nation to be viable and modern, a new culturally-aware identity needs to be elaborated. This conception of a symbiotic existence of national culture and national well-being continues in force from the avant-gardist 1920s and 1930s through Cardenal’s own “Generation of 1940,” and onto the inception, and eventual dominance, of exteriorismo.

vuelve 9. Jorge H. Valdés argues for the aptness of exteriorism to Cardenal’s politics in “Cardenal’s Exteriorism: The Ideology Underlying the Esthetic.”

vuelve 10. For a critical comparison of Cardenal’s pre-revolutionary and Sandinista poetry see Reginald Gibbons’ “Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal.”.

vuelve 11. Epigramas’ first edition’s preface states that the collection was written between 1952 and 1957, prior to Cardenal’s novitiate in Gethsemany’s Trappist monastery. It should also be noted that Epigramas as a complete text is little known. As Dorfman laments, most readers have only read anthologized epigrams and not the 50 originals (1984: 221).

vuelve 12. Recently, Cardenal allowed his very early love to be published as part of a literary analysis. See Carmen y otros poemas.

vuelve 13. The principal comprehensive studies of Cardenal’s poetry include the following: Hacia el hombre nuevo: poesía y pensamiento de Ernesto Cardenal (1984) by Paul W. Borgeson; La poesía de Ernesto Cardenal: Cristianismo y revolución by Eduardo Urdanivia Bertarelli; and the compilation edited by José Promis Ojeda et al, Ernesto Cardenal: poeta de la liberación latinoamericana (1975). Many articles and book chapters dealing with various aspects of Cardenal’s biography and poetry have also been published by leading critics of Central and Latin American poetry including Jorge Eduardo Arellano, John Beverley, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Greg Dawes, Claire Pailler, Robert Pring-Mill, William Rowe and Marc Zimmerman.

vuelve 14. In a similar line but from a semiotics’ perspective, Santiago Daydí-Tolson convincingly posits that the epigrams’ potential readers are of a specific cultural and socioeconomic background, “Es evidente que el lector propuesto por el texto está limitado por coordenadas de cultura y clase económica que coinciden con la imagen que Cardenal tenía entonces de su público, como lo confirman el dato biográfico y la intención política de la colección [cites Arellano’s 1972 Introduction]. Se puede hablar de una relativa correspondencia entre el objetivo comunicativo y su cumplimiento, siendo difícil incluir a un lector popular como parte del público de los epigramas” (1984: 21).

vuelve 15. Suggestively, Fernández Retamar has also opined that Cardenal’s translations of Catullus and Martial provide the reader with a “better” reading of Cardenal’s originals (46).

vuelve 16. For comparative readings of Cardenal’s usage and rewriting of Latin tradition see Juan P. Magunagoicoechea’s “Iniciación poética en los Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal” (1979), Claire Pailler’s “Ernesto Cardenal, épigrammes romaines, épigrammes nicaraguayennes: fragments d’une autobiographie poétique” (1981), Rosario Cortés Tovar’s “Tradición clásica en Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal” (2000) and Marcos Ruiz Sánchez’s “Los Epigramas de Ernesto Cardenal: renovación de un género” (2000).

vuelve 17. It is ironic then, that years later Cuadra would refuse to publish poetry that “veered too much in the direction of the FSLN” (Beverley & Zimmerman, 1990: 87).

vuelve 18. Valdés argues against Cardenal’s apparent attempt to depoliticize exteriorism in a 1980s interview. Valdés quotes Cardenal as stating that exteriorism is an aesthetic choice, “‘not from a conscious desire to play a social or political role in our verse’” (64). He shows that Cardenal’s stance in this interview minimizes exteriorismo’s ideological implications and the fact that this poet “embraced an esthetic ideology consonant with his political beliefs” (69).

vuelve 19. Rowe attributes the concurrence of love and politics to Cardenal’s classical models, “This [classical] tone precludes any division between public and inner life […] (89).

vuelve 20. In a fashion analogous to Somoza (see the well-known eighteenth epigram where sirens’ “aullido lúgubre” represent the fearsome dictator), the lover also overpowers the poetic from afar (with her gaze, in this case).

vuelve 21. The abstract nature of epigram forty’s “aguijón” contradicts exteriorismo’s preference for the concrete. In his “rules” for the Ministry’s poetry workshops, Cardenal distinguishes between the undesired poetry of ideas and that of objects, “Rather than being based on ideas, poetry needs to be based on things which reach us through the senses…” (quoted in Livingstone, 1993: 6).

vuelve 22. According to Dorfman, this epigram reveals love poetry’s social dimension, “Escribir versos de amor es un modo de combatir la enajenación, liquidar a la dictadura en su lugar más cotidiano, allá donde ni siquiera se sospecha que pudiera alejarse, en las relaciones infrahumanas” (1984: 264-265).

vuelve 23. Joaquín Pasos was a penniless, little-known Nicaraguan poet. See Cardenal’s comments on Pasos in his introduction to Orlando Cuadra Downing’s 1949 anthology of new Nicaraguan poetry and his brief comments in his own 1974 anthology.

vuelve 24. According to Magunagoicoechea, Cardenal’s poetic speaker generally uses conjunctions such as “pero,” “sino,” and “y” in the middle of epigrams to set up a comparison between the text’s two sections and thus, “La coordinación adversative hace de puente de paso a la nota de ridículo o de ironía que el poeta comunica al lector” (94).

vuelve 25. Epigram thirty-four, “Nuestros poemas no se pueden publicar todavía,” for example, demonstrates the poetic speaker’s belief in the lasting power of his poetry as both oppositional and literary texts.

vuelve 26. Many years after the publication of this epigram, Cardenal and critics of his poetry have commented on the negative effects his integration into the Sandinista state had on his poetry writing.

vuelve 27. Magunagoicoechea asserts that U.S. poets Pound and W.H. Auden share Cardenal’s view of the poet as “language purifier,” “Pero esta responsabilidad es aún mayor en circunstancias graves como las que amenudo imperan en un régimen de tiranía. W.H. Auden concedía una dimensión política a esta función del poeta al decir que para el poeta hay solo [sic] un deber político y es el de defender el lenguaje de su corrupción. […] cuando se corrompe, el pueblo pierde su fe en lo que oye [. . .]” (99).

vuelve 29. In “La poesía de Ernesto Cardenal: historia y trascendencia,” Víctor Farias maintains that the only obstacle between God and the soul, “es la realidad pasada del monje y el drama de un pueblo torturado” (111).