upon the visionary quality of his verses, visions that he “copied” and for whose strangeness, singularity and passion he alone was accountable. These are verses written, “not in academic ink, but rather in my own blood,” an image used by the poet to refer to their personal quality as well as the aura of sacrifice and martyrdom that pervades so many of the poems. Their key words are love, liberty, unconquered, passionate, natural, vigorous. To this linguistic base, José Olivio Jiménez adds another that centers around the terms circumstance, nature, transcendence, and three concepts: love, suffering, duty. The originality of these poems consists in their anguish. It is a poetry of existence in which the poet/narrator confronts the imperative to transmit an authentic, sincere, necessary reality. “What matters in poetry,” he wrote, “is to feel, regardless of whether it resembles what others have felt; and what is felt anew, is new.”
Images of nature, often traditional in origin, appear in this volume as in others by the Cuban, but it is man, not nature, that occupies the center of his poetic discourse. It is a poetry that speaks of daily cares, experiences, existences; it radiates in circular patterns, reaching toward the upper spheres, that is, toward a quality of transcendence noted by Jiménez, and which in spatial form points to the fundamentally realistic; it is based upon specific, concrete circumstances: those of his life, and of the emotions of his existence. Unamuno called Martí’s words “acts”; but when the Cuban poet harnessed his words to his thoughts he created novel structures which even today surprise us by dint of their modernity.
The visionary quality of his first volume persists in Free Verse; present also are the dualities of experience, the antithetical images that constitute Martí’s assumption of the contradictions of modern life and the aspirations of perfection and idealistic placement of his visionary poetics. The dualities sometimes represent a world truncated, or the poet’s simple vision of life: “I have lived: I have died.” The poet in his anguish wishes to sacrifice himself to his fellow man, for that is his mission in life. At times, he feels useless, unable to realize the martyrdom that will release him from his terrestrial struggle and allow him, finally, to seek an undefined solace in a vaguely expressed afterlife.
Less anguished, at least at first glance, are the poems of Simple Verses. Their apparent serenity is linked to their traditional, popular metrics, and to the poet’s insistence upon more direct and unencumbered forms of expression in comparison with the “volcanic eruptions” of the previous volumes. In this volume there is an emphasis upon the harmony of life and philosophy, or at least upon a system of transformation from crass, material forms to noble, ideal objects. And this search for and belief in idealism and harmony lends the volume a placid quality which has disquieting moments, for the Simple Verses are poems born of pain and anguish: “My friends know how these verses were born in my heart. It was in that winter of anguish, in which out of ignorance, or due to fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the Spanish American republics met in Washington, in the shadow of the dreaded eagle,” wrote Martí in the introduction. Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., called by the United States to standardize currency in Latin America. Martí led the opposition of the Latin American countries to the plans of the United States to impose a silver standard.
Elsewhere, the poet explained that “To suffer is a duty. With what does one write well in prose or verse, but with blood?” The poet’s anguish is personalized. The verses speak of his individual view of the world, as the poet/seer turns his eyes upon the universe internalized, and describes its external and internal structures. The poet has assumed the universe, and from a symbiotic stance he offers new insights into its meaning. Martí’s experience is broad: it includes the divine spirit, the terrestrial clamor of voices, envy, hate, human ugliness, materialism, idealism, the metamorphosis of reality. The nature of writing poetry is also present here as in previous volumes. But, unlike these, experience is expressed from the viewpoint of a compendium, seen, to be sure, from the interior world (“I know,” “I’ve seen,” “I hear,” “I am,”) of the creator in search of harmony:
All is beautiful
and constant,
All is melody and reason,
And all, like a diamond,
Is dark before light.
In Simple Verses one finds the most frequently cited Martí verses: IX is devoted to “La niña de Guatemala” (“The Girl From Guatemala”), and X to “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”). Other sections may be less musical and more anguished, but all point to the future in modern poetry. In VIII and XI the poet carries on a dialogue with his doubles: a page/skeleton; a dead friend. In the end, in XLVI a conversation is established between the poet and his verse in which he declares, “Verse, as one our fates are sealed:/We are damned or saved together!”
Both Martí and his poetry have survived; but not merely Martí the poet. Martí is one of Spanish America’s most original prose writers. “Verses,” he said, “can be improvised, but not prose; prose style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.
His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the New York Sun he wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.
Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.
Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve
