Celebración

In a substantial part of this book, American poetry (in the broad sense of the term) is read in search of the common and characteristic features that cross the continent. One of them, fundamental and not sufficiently studied until now, is the preponderance of the celebratory poem. Due to the untimely nature of its development, the national literatures of the American republics could not support its foundation on epics or heroic poems. That vigor was transmuted into a hymnical tessitura, precisely when poetry in Europe, after romanticism, was going to take the opposite drift, towards the elegiac. Starting from a documented foundation of this "song of the present", which goes from Whitman to Marianne Moore and Derek Walcott, and from Chocano and Darío to Neruda and Zurita, Dobry stops at the work of Juan L. Ortiz, the great poet of the River Plate river coast. Another decisive feature of the American position is specified in the simultaneity of past and present that, with various modulations, is found in T. S. Eliot, Lezama Lima, Borges and Haroldo de Campos. Dobry studies the configuration of these antihistoricist constructions, in whose substratum he makes the ideas of Benedetto Croce resonate. The book also addresses some significant phenomena of poetic creation in Latin America since the second half of the 20th century, such as the homage to Darío by Juan José Saer, the first of Nicanor Parra's "antipoems", the "irregular situation" of Enrique Lihn, the last writings of Pizarnik or the "straight democracy" of Alejandro Rubio, among others.