he renewed his writing for the Sun. New York was to be Martí’s permanent home until he returned to Cuba, just prior to his untimely death fighting for Cuba’s liberation on May 19, 1895. In New York, which both attracted and repelled Martí, he wrote his best prose and poetry. Amidst the din and clatter of an industrializing society, plagued by labor strikes, anarchist terrorist attacks, and racial and religious conflicts, Martí peered into the fortune of a capitalist society, and from this vantage point drew conclusions he described in his prose pieces about life in the United States written for Latin America’s major newspaper, La Nación (Buenos Aires). His association during 1883 with this newspaper was followed by invitations from others, among them La República (Honduras), La Opinión Pública (Uruguay), and El Partido Liberal (Mexico).
To earn enough for survival, this extraordinary writer became a versatile professional: a translator for Appleton, a clerk for Lyon and Company, a consul for Uruguay (1887) and Argentina (1890). Writing and political organization took up the rest of his energy and time. Martí immersed himself in the careful planning of the Cuban revolutionary process. He organized patriotic clubs not merely in the New York area, but all along the Eastern seaboard, especially in Florida among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West. Addressing these working class groups he displayed a passion and fervor that transfixed his audiences. Unfortunately, many of these speeches have been lost. A few that have survived, such as “Los pinos nuevos” (“The New Pines”) show the hand of a writer of learning, passion, and rhythmic prose, and of an accomplished political tactician who skillfully swayed his audience.
With the generals of the revolutionary forces, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí organized and monitored the émigré groups. In 1884 he had a falling out with the generals, especially Gómez; but later he worked with them again to raise the funds and provide the organization and arms for the 1895 invasion of Cuba. Martí’s was a Herculean task, superior to his dwindling physical strength, vitiated years before by lesions and diseases contracted in the quarries of San Lázaro. Yet such was his determination to see the liberation of his home land that will and desire sustained a calendar of activities which would have sent more robust souls to an early grave.
Patriotism and martyrdom in the cause of Cuba and Puerto Rico consumed his being. Writing and his faith in the revolution kept him alive. To be sure, there were frequent moments of despair. His experiences with human cruelty were such that at one point he wrote: “It is with horror that one looks within many intelligent and attractive men. One leaves in fright, as from a lion’s den.” This modern Machiavellian analyst wrote: “Men like to be guided by those who abound in their own shortcomings.” Cognizant of human foibles, but committed to social redemption, he noted: “Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.” Martí’s was an 18th century faith in the perfectability of humankind, in social progress and in the feasibility of socio economic reform. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he needed to be persuaded of the inevitability of violent change, which he espoused only when all other viable channels were exhausted.
Martí found temporary release from anguish in poetic creation. Poetry had a double interface for him: “To create beautiful poetry one has only to turn one’s eyes outward: to Nature; and inward: to the soul.” Nature was an enchantress, who consoled, fortified and soothed. By contrast, internal suffering purified inspirations and provided release from the oppressive realities of everyday existence. Pain, said Martí, “matures poetry… Man needs to suffer. When he lacks real pain, he creates it. Pain purifies and prepares.” Convinced that suffering engenders art, the poet poured his personal anguish into his verses.
Martí wrote three major books of poetry: Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (Simple Verses, 1891), and Versos libres (Free Verse, 1913). A fourth volume, entitled Flores del destierro (Flowers of Exile, 1933), somewhat loosely organized by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, and some other poems have been traditionally included in other volumes. Ismaelillo and Simple Verses were published in New York during the poet’s lifetime; he read the proof for both works. Free Verse was first published posthumously, transcribed inaccurately from complex manuscripts and corrected by the present writer.
All of the volumes have one element in common: one which Karl Vossler described as the characteristic of all poets of intense fantasy: a capacity for liberating themselves from the norms of the linguistic community; by passing under or over words, such poets create works by means of notes, melodies, rhythms, images, gestures and dances. This is the case with Martí and that of other Modernist poets of his generation: they were subjective creators, attentive to internal flux. In this connection, Fina García Marruz finds syllabic groupings of suffering in Free Verse, and Cintio Vitier senses the voice of a poet of light and movements, who creates a baroque, obscure, foaming, volcanic, abrupt and strange world. Martí’s is a highly original verse, in which there is both innovation and tradition, a paradoxical admixture common to the poets of the Age of Modernity, intent upon recasting the past to express an unstable present.
Of Martí’s three principal poetic works, Ismaelillo is a free, luminous volume, written largely in Caracas, and published in New York. Its imagery is so singular that the poet felt compelled to comment on its oneiric quality in a letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez on May 23, 1882:
I’ve seen those wings, those jackals, those empty goblets, those armies. My mind was the stage, and on it all those visions were actors. My work, Jugo, consisted of copying. There isn’t one single mental line there. And, how should I be responsible for the images which come to me without calling them? I have done nothing more than put my visions into verse.
The volume is dedicated to the poet’s absent son. The poet occupies the center of a visionary space in which the perils of modern life assault the poet/narrator. “Alarmed by everything, I take refuge in you,” he writes to his son in the brief introduction. The absent son is ever-present in verses whose levels of reality and dreams reach beyond the limits of 19th century positivism and reason. “I dream with open eyes,” reads the first line of “Sueño despierto” (“I Dream Awake”). The visionary quality is sometimes surrealistic: “And on the backs/Of giant birds/Endless kisses/Awaken.” Though a process of inversion, a metamorphosis is effected by filial love; the father conjures up the vision of the son, and in this vision is reborn through the son: “I am the son of my son!/He remakes me!” This identification of father and son orchestrates and unifies the metaphoric eruptions of a volume, which, at bottom, is a musical concert centering around three motifs, filled with chaotic, tender and troubled leaps to a loosely associated poetic space. Ismaelillo’s motifs are the poet, the son, the world; the leaps are executed in the form of voyages in which traditional time and space concepts are unhinged so that the poet-son can move freely outside the limitations of a traditional Logos. In “Musa traviesa” (“Mischievous Muse”) he writes: “Often, a rider/In momentous dreams,/I ride long hours,/Through the air./I pierce rosy clouds/I fathom deep seas,/And in the eternal bowels/I travel.”
In these travels the poet/son/seer comes upon battles, visions of martyrdom, caves, dances, erotic scenes, heights of idealism and depths of materialism; it is a confusing world the narrator captures: reflecting the frightening realities of modern life. We witness torments, confused scenes, temptations, moments of disarray, and spirited battle. It is a spectacle of “splendid transformations” that boils, creaks, bites and assaults the agonists of modern life. In keeping with these decentered, fragmented visions, the son is Ismael, Jacob, the object of pleasure, love, tenderness, the heart, the soul of the father and, finally, not merely his reflection but his very being. Thus, this volume, more than the lyric prayer book Rubén Darío found it to be, more than the “Art of Being a Father” which he saw in it, is rather a voyage that incarnates a modern mythic sense of experience and existence.
Equally personal, and equally anguished are the poems of Free Verse. Darío said of them that they were free verse, produced by a free man. Martí called them “my irritated Free Verses,” “my rough hendecasyllables, borne of great fears, or of great hopes, or
