American poets must come to terms with Whitman, either following his style (Stevens, Ginsberg) or reacting against it (T. S. Eliot).

• pro: (wild people, experimental forms, raw emotions): Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Diane Wakowski, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, + many others
  
• con: (refined people, style, and  subjects): T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Dickinson, Marianne Moore  

International influence: Contemporary British poets including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Algernon Swinburne admired Whitman, and the latter experimented with his free-verse style, which also influenced continental European poets in France and Italy, etc. 

• Compared to tightly focused and quirkily lyrical poets like Dickinson, Whitman translates well.
  
• Whitman's style and subject matter influenced South and Central American poets: Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, J. L. Borges. (If interested in Neruda, see the popular 90s film Il Postino (The Postman))

Whitman widely seen as among the first great modern poets, in terms of poetic style and lifestyle.

• Lifestyle: artist as bohemian, non-conformist, “other,” outsider trying to connect.
  
• Liberation of free verse & expansion of poetic subject matter shook up poetic world > now standard  

"You Gotta Know these Latin American Writers"

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, poet, essayist, short-story author
1899-1986

early life in Europe as well as Argentina

head of National Library of Argentina

Many, many collections of translated poetry, short stories, essays

From an internet biography:

After World War I the Borges family lived in Spain, where he was a member of avant-garde Ultraist literary group. His first poem, 'Hymn to the Sea,' written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia.

J. L. Borges, "Remorse"

J. L. Borges, "Limits"

Pablo Neruda, great 20th-century poet of Chile
1904-1973

1971 Nobel Prize for Literature

Communist senator in Chilean congress before exile

Il Postino (1994 film)

 . . . The American poet Walt Whitman, whose framed portrait Neruda later kept on his table, become a major influence on his work. "I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes," Neruda said in 1972 in a speech during a visit in the United States. (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/neruda.htm)

from Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, ed. by Richard Burgin, 1998, regarding Neruda:

"We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature." 

Pablo Neruda, "Brown and Agile Child"

Pablo Neruda, Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Octavio Paz, Mexican poet, essayist, diplomat
1914-1998

1990 Nobel Prize in Literature

born in village near Mexico City during Mexican Revolution

grandfather a novelist, father a liberal reformer

1962 Mexico's ambassador to India

most famous book: The Labyrinth of Solitude re Mexican character

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude & Other Writings. (El Laberinto de la Soledad, 1950) trans. Lysander Kemp. NY: Grove, 1961, 1985.

On the "pachuco," a subculture of Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles, early 20th century:

16 . . . In the case of the pachuco there is an obvious ambiguity: his clothing spotlights and isolates him, but at the same time it pays homage to the society he is attempting to deny. . . . Everyone agrees in finding something hybrid about him, something disturbing and fascinating. He is surrounded by an aura of ambivalent notions . . . .

17 He denies both the society from which he originated and that of North America.

84 It is no secret to anyone that Mexican Catholicism is centered about the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the first place, she is an Indian Virgin; in the second place, the scene of her appearance to the Indian Juan Diego was a hill that formerly contained a sanctuary dedicated to Tonantzin, "Our Mother," the Aztec goddess of fertility. We know that the Conquest coincided with the apogee of the cult of two masucline divinities: Quetzalcoatl, the self-sacrificing god, and Huitzilopochtli, the young warrior-god. The defeat of these gods . . . caused the faithful to return to the ancient feminine deities. . . .

85 The Indian goddesses were goddesses of fecundity, linked to the cosmic rhythms, the vegetative processes and agrarian rites. The Catholic Virgin is also the Mother (some Indian pilgrims still call her Guadalupe-Tonantzin), but her principle attribute is not to watch over the fertility of the earth but to provide refuge for the unfortunate. . . . The Virgin is the consolation of the poor . . . .. In sum, she is the Mother of orphans. All men are born disinherited and their true condition is orphanhood, but this is particularly true among the Indians and the poor in Mexico.

87 The Mexican does not want to be either an Indian or a Spaniard. Nor does he want to be descended from them. He denies them. And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction . . . . His beginnings are in his own self.

Between Going and Coming

Street

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