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The Politics of Form: Three Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet
Kuhnheim, Jill S.
Kuhnheim, Jill S.
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Abstract
This article engages the idea of poetic form to create a
dialogue among three very different twentieth-century Spanish American
poets: Argentine Alfonsina Storni, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Cuban Reinaldo
Arenas. Each of them uses the sonnet’s privileged position in Western
aesthetic tradition to manifest shifting relations to this tradition and to
modernity. In this, they open a dialogue with the lettered elite and use part
of their cultural inheritance as letrados to confront the old order through
an established aesthetic form, to reconfigure or question the opposition
between high and low cultural forms to varying degrees and to different
ends. These poets resignify their cultural legacy and in the process demonstrate
its malleability—the sonnet is not monolithic, but mutable. An invitation
to reinvent, the sonnet as employed by these poets embodies a range
of intercultural experiences of both continuity and transformation. These
readings, which engage with a range of poetic traditions (such as North
American New Formalism), reveal how the choice of poetic form both
shapes and depends upon the author’s and his or her readers’ experience
and how a particular aesthetic form is both charged and changed by circumstance.
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All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.
Date
2008
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University of Pennsylvania Press
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Citation
“The Politics of Form: Three Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet.” Hispanic Review 76.4 (autumn 2008): 387-411. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hir.0.0027