Found in the last of Gabriela Mistral’s published books of poetry, Una mujer (A Woman) reflects the maturity and skill of its author. Lagar (Wine Press) is the product of an experienced poet, although the volume reflects the issues that… Read More ›
Chilean Literature
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Walking Around
It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes…. Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Tonight I Can Write
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Pablo Neruda declares in the opening, and the reader believes him. In simple, incantatory language, the poet’s longing for a lost love suffuses his perceptions of the natural world: “To hear the immense… Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Ode with a Lament
A speaker praises his loved one, yet finds he is unable to satisfy her: this is not an unfamiliar trope in Neruda’s work. But in Ode with a Lament, from the second volume of Neruda’s somber Residencia en la Tierra… Read More ›
Analysis of Nicanor Parra’s Memories of Youth
Although Nicanor Parra characterizes his later works as “ecopoetry” (see Ecopoetics), his first volumes belong to an earlier movement, which he termed “antipoetry.” While the title of Parra’s second volume (Poemas y antipoemas) announced Parra’s new concept of the antipoem… Read More ›
Analysis of Enrique Lihn’s The Dark Room
The title poem of Enrique Lihn’s 1963 collection La pieza oscura (The Dark Room) uses dense description and rich symbolism to communicate the problematic division between childhood and adulthood. The setting of La pieza oscura gives the poem its title…. Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica – Pablo Neruda Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins, endowed with a singular heart and fatal dreams, impetuously pale, withered in the forehead and in mourning like an angry widower every day of my life, oh,… Read More ›
Analysis of Vicente Huidobro’s Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica Let poetry be like a key Opening a thousand doors A leaf falls; something flies by; Let all the eye sees be created And the soul of the listener tremble. Invent new worlds and watch your word; The… Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Amor America
Neruda begins all of Canto General with “Amor America (1400),” in the opening section titled A Lamp of Earth. The significance of the year 1400 is that it marks a time before the arrival of Christopher Columbus or any other… Read More ›
Analysis of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor
Altazor, a coinage derived from “alto” (high) and “azor” (hawk), the work identified by its recent English translator as Huidobro’s masterpiece, interrogates both the nature of the modern poet and his lofty aspirations. Despite its importance, however, Altazor is also… Read More ›
Analysis of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits
The first novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (1942– ), The House of the Spirits remains the author’s best-known and most popular work, despite the subsequent success of her following novels, memoirs, and children’s books. Although the book received… Read More ›
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