Lesson 19

Lesson 19: Early 20C: Nationalism, Ethnic relationships, the Role of Women

I. 20th Century Cultural Fragmentation

With the coming of the new century it becomes more and more difficult to see clear patterns between historical trends, major cultural movements, and their manifestation in the arts and literature. The Mexican Revolution gives us a clear-cut case in which this is still possible, but that phenomenon was limited to one country even if it was closely watched in many others. Looking at Latin America as a whole in the 20th Century, we find that there is no single movement, such as Modernism or Romanticism, that permeates the cultural life of almost all the nations and which has a clear pattern of influence in the arts as well as the history of the period.

In a very general sense, one can identify some of the major elements of this fragmentation as follows:

1. An escapist literature (also present in the arts), which is a sort of heir to the Modernist trend to emphasize the esthetic element over the content, to such a point that in its extreme manifestation the form is all and content nothing. In painting this current is represented by abstract art, especially in its more radical forms.

2. A post-modernist, or anti-modernist current, which is a reaction to the excessive estheticism of Modernism, and in which simplicity and sincerity are dominant. In painting, primitive or naive art provides a parallel.

3. Literature of fantasy and imagination, including themes that are psychological and surrealistic. Sometimes authors use historical myths, including pre-Columbian ones. In the arts, surrealism closely parallels this literary current.

4. The literature of the Mexican Revolution (examined previously), which is closely associated with Mexican muralism.

5. Social protest and revolutionary literature in various forms, which is also accompanied by a similar current in painting, including some Mexican muralism.

6. Feminist literature.

7. Many other currents.

The world of art continued to be influenced by various European currents which sometimes had relationships to the fragmented trends listed above and sometimes did not. France continued to be the principal source of these movements, which included traditional academic painting, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Many (if not most) major Latin American painters spent time in Europe (mainly France), and would return to their native Latin American country inspired by the latest European movement. At times these fresh infusions died out, and at times they caught on or became modified by local movements. So it should not surprise us that a major Mexican Muralist like Diego Rivera should have gone through a Cubist phase, and another in which Surrealism is evident.

II. The Impact of Latin American Nationalism

A major force in Latin America had always been nationalism. It grew out of regional pride in things local or American, in contrast to those ideas and things brought over from the Old World. In the Colonial period there was a distinct current of local pride among the criollos which set them apart from the authorities sent from Spain or Portugal. This nativism, as we have seen, was a factor in creating the split which led to Independence. The Independence struggle created national symbols and myths in the form of the military heroes, their exploits, paintings of these heroes and their battles, flags, anthems, national crests and seals, and literature that exalted all of these things.

The Mexican Revolution, although limited in its impact to one country, permitted an outpouring of this nationalist spirit and its expression in both art and literature. Parallel movements sprung up in other countries, especially those where pride in things Indigenous or Pre-Columbian was allowed to break through the veneer imposed by the elites who continued to focus their primary attention on Europe.

Economic nationalism was also present in the form of resentment over foreign exploitation of national resources, most notably those non-renewable ones for which it seemed the powerful international "centers" of trade could set the price paid to the "peripheries". Oil in particular was closely linked to economic nationalism, and one of the major goals of the Mexican Revolution was to wrest control of Mexico's oil away from the US and British companies which had extracted it for so many years under the Díaz dictatorship. Economic nationalism surrounding oil was also present in Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina at various times. Unfortunately, economic nationalism frequently found its target in the United States investors and their government.

III. Ethnic relationships

The twentieth century also saw important changes in the relative power and roles of various ethnic groups. The Mexican Revolution showed that the domination by the traditional Caucasian Creole families was not unchangeable. The rise of a predominantly Mestizo middle class in that country (and others) challenged that basic assumption, as did the increasing self-assertion of Indigenous and Black groups.

From the beginning of the Colonial period Latin America had a rich and varied ethnic heritage resulting from the three distinct waves of immigration: the Indigenous, the European, and the African. These intermingled far more than in North America, and the stereotypical Latin American soon came to be the Mestizo, with varying degrees of contribution from these three major currents. But although all three groups contributed, for many years of the Colonial period the rigid social and economic structure kept the Caucasians at the top, the Mestizos in the middle, and the Indigenous and Blacks on the bottom.

After Independence in the 19th Century the prevailing Social Darwinian and Spencerian ideas from Europe tended to continue the Colonial patterns, creating a general assumption that anything that came from Caucasian Europe (especially France and northern Europe) was superior to anything African or Indigenous American. The slowly rising tide of Latin American nationalism gradually erased the power of these prejudices, although they still remain.

Slavery had been formally abolished in most of the Spanish speaking nations shortly after Independence, late in the 19th Century in Brazil, and later yet in Cuba and other Caribbean Islands. Blacks, however, found that subtle and not so subtle forms of economic and social domination closed many opportunities to them even after the end of slavery, and there has been a slow struggle to overcome these obstacles in those countries where the plantation economy left a legacy of large numbers of people of African descent.

The Indigenous movement in the Mexican Revolution found echo in the other pre-Columbian center of a high-density civilization: Peru. Here in the 1930's a social and political movement called the Popular American Revolutionary Alliance (APRA-Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) confronted the traditional order and demanded equality of rights for the Indigenous and other ethnic groups. The reading which follows is by José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the founders of APRA who later broke with the movement.

José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru, 1894-1930)

Mariátegui was one of the great essayists of the Latin American left, whose writings continue to influence the ideas and plans for reform proposed by socialists and others in various parts of the continent. He began his career as a journalist, using this means to propagate his progressive ideas, and for a time was a political ally of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the founder of the APRA movement. In the 1920's he lived in Italy and Germany, observed those nations' drift toward fascism, and established close contact with European socialists.

Upon returning to Peru, he broke with Haya de la Torre and founded the Peruvian Socialist Party. He wrote "Seven Essays for the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality", in which he analyzed the feudalism of the old Peruvian colonial institutions and the way in which they continued to survive in his country. Of special interest to Mariátegui was the situation of the Peruvian Indian, who, despite innumerable laws and good intentions, continued to be essentially a feudal vassal to the large Peruvian landowners.

Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality (Fragments)

by José Carlos Mariátegui

THE INDIAN PROBLEM

All the theses regarding the Indian problem, which avoid or do not address it as a socio-economic problem, are just more sterile theoretical exercises (and sometimes only verbal ones at that), condemned to be absolutely discredited. Not even their good faith can save some of them. They have pretty much served only to hide or disfigure the reality of the problem. On the other hand, the socialist critique discovers and clarifies the problem, because it seeks its causes in the country's economy and not in its administrative, juridical or ecclesiastical mechanism, nor in the duality of plurality of races, nor in its cultural or moral situation. The Indigenous problem begins in our economy. It has its roots in the land ownership regime. Any attempt to resolve it with administrative or police measures, with educational methods, or road-building, will be a superficial or secondary project, as long as the feudalism of the "gamonales" continues.

"Gamonalism" inevitably invalidates every law and ordinance set up to protect the Indigenous peoples. The landowner, the latifundist, is a feudal lord. Against his authority, aided by the environment and habit, the written law is impotent. Free labor is prohibited by law, and yet, free labor, and even forced labor, survive in the latifundium. The judge, the subprefect, the constable, the teacher, the tax collector, are vassals to the feudalism of large landownership. The law cannot prevail against the gamonales. The official who insists on imposing the law, will be abandoned and sacrificed by the central power structure, around which the influences of gamonalismo are always omnipotent, whether they act directly, or through the parliament, and are equally efficient whichever path they take. ...

The oldest and most evident defeat is, without a doubt, that which reduces the protection of the Indigenous peoples to a matter of ordinary administration. From the days of Spanish colonial legislation, the wise and tidy ordinances, drafted after conscientious surveys, show themselves to be totally fruitless. The prolific output of the Republic, from the days of Independence, in matters of decrees, laws, and other measures seeking to protect the Indians against exploitation and abuse, is at least large and considerable. But today's gamonal, just the like "encomendero" of yesterday, has nevertheless very little to fear from administrative theory. He knows that things are different in practice.

The individualistic nature of the legislation of the Republic has favored, without a doubt, the absorption of Indigenous property by the latifundium system. The Indians' situation, in this sense, was more realistically addressed by Spanish legislation. But legal reforms have no greater practical value than administrative reforms, when faced with a feudalism which is intact in its economic structure. ...

The assumption that the Indigenous problem is an ethnical problem is fed by the oldest repertoire of imperialistic ideas. The concept of inferior races served the white West well in its task of expansion and conquest. To hope for the emancipation of the Indigenous on the basis of the mixing of the aboriginal race with that of white immigrants, is an anti-sociological naiveté... The Asian peoples, who are not one bit superior to the Indigenous peoples, have assimilated Western culture, insofar as its dynamic and creative aspects are concerned, in an admirable way, without transfusions of European blood. ...

The tendency to consider the Indigenous problem as a moral problem, embodies a conception that is liberal, humanitarian, nineteenth centuryish, enlightened, which in the political order of the West animates and motivates the "leagues of the Rights of Man". The antislavery conferences and societies, which in Europe have denounced more or less fruitlessly the crimes of the colonizers, are born from this tendency, which has always relied too much on the calls to civilization's moral sense... The humanitarian preaching has neither stopped nor impeded imperialism in Europe, nor has it modified its methods. The struggle against imperialism no longer relies on anything but solidarity and the strength of the movements for emancipation of the colonial masses ...

In the field of reason and morality some centuries ago one could locate, with greater energy, or at least with greater authority, religious action. This crusade did not create, nevertheless, anything but laws and other measures which were very wisely inspired. The fate of the Indians did not vary substantially ... Despite this, religious preaching had more evident possibilities for success than liberal preaching. Religious preaching appealed to the exalted and operational Spanish Catholicism, while the former attempted to gain the ear of the insufficient and formal local American liberalism.

But today the hope for an ecclesiastical solution is undoubtedly the most obsolete and anti-historical of all. Those who represent it are not even concerned with their distant (so distant!) teachers in obtaining a new declaration of the rights of the Indians, with adequate authorities and ordinances, but rather they are concerned with charging the missionary with the function of mediating between the Indian and the gamonal. This task the Church could not accomplish in a medieval order, when its spiritual and intellectual capacity could be measured in churchmen like Father Las Casas. So with what instruments can it count on to prosper now? In this sense, the Adventist evangelistic missions have moved ahead of the Catholic clergy ...

The notion that the problem of the Indian is an educational one, does not seem to be supported by a strictly and authentically pedagogical criterion. Pedagogy today must take into consideration, more than ever before, the social and economic factors. The modern pedagogue knows perfectly well that education is not simply a matter of schools and didactic methods. The social and economic environment inexorably conditions the work of the teacher. Gamonalism is fundamentally adverse to the education of the Indian; his survival requires maintaining the ignorance of the Indian as much as the cultivation of alcoholism. The modern school is incompatible with the feudal latifundium. The mechanics of serfdom would totally annul the actions of the school, even if the school through some miracle inconceivable within the existing social reality and the feudal atmosphere, might be able to conserve its purely pedagogical mission. Even the most efficient and grandiose moral teaching would not be able to create those miracles ...

The pedagogical solution, proposed by many in perfect good faith, is not officially discarded. The educationalists are, I repeat, those who can least think of making it independent of socio-economic reality. At the present moment such a solution does not exist, except as a vague and unformed suggestion, for which no institution or doctrine assumes responsibility.

The new analysis consists of seeking the Indian problem in the problem of land.

THE LAND PROBLEM.

Those of us who from the socialist viewpoint study and define the problem of the Indian, begin by stating that the humanitarian and philanthropic viewpoints are obsolete in that, as a prolongation of the apostolic battle of Father Las Casas, they are based on an ancient pro-Indian campaign. Our first effort attempts to establish the basically economic nature of the problem. We rebel, basically, against the instinctive (and defensive) tendency of the criollo to reduce it to an exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic or moral problem, in order to avoid at all costs the plane of economics. For this reason, the most absolutely incorrect of the reproaches which can be leveled against us is that of lyricism or literaturism. By placing the socio-economic issues in center-stage, we assume an attitude that is as far removed from lyricism and literaturism as possible. We are not content with restoring the Indians' right to education, culture, progress, love and heaven. We begin by restoring, categorically, the Indians' right to land. This restoration is a totally materialistic one, and should be enough to keep anyone from confusing us with the inheritors or imitators of the evangelistical preaching of the great Spanish priest who, for our part, we greatly and fervorously admire despite our materialism.

Nor does this problem of land, whose solidarity with the problem of the Indian is all too evident, cause us to diminish, reconcile or attenuate it opportunistically. Quite the opposite. For my part, I try to lay out the problem in terms that are absolutely unequivocal and unadulterated.

The agrarian problem can be presented, above all, as the problem of the liquidation of feudalism in Peru. This liquidation should have been carried out by the demo-bourgeois regime which was formally established by the independence revolution. But in Peru in the last hundred years we have not really had a true middle class or a true capitalistic class. The ancient feudal class, camouflaged or disguised as the republican middle class, has kept its strength ... And the fact is that during the century of the republic, the large agrarian land holdings have been strengthened and increased despite the theoretical liberalism of our Constitution, and of the practical requirements of the development of our capitalist economy.

The surviving expressions of feudalism are two: latifundium and serfdom ... We cannot liquidate the serfdom that burdens the Indigenous race without liquidating the latifundium.

Once we lay out the agrarian problem in Peru this way, there is no room for erroneous deformations. The economic-social (and therefore political) problem emerges in all its magnitude from the domain of those men who act in that plane of actions and ideas. And it is fruitless to try and convert it, for example, into a technical-agricultural problem in the domain of the agronomists.

No one denies that the liberal solution to this problem would, in accordance with the individualist ideology, be the breaking up of the latifundiums in favor of small landownership. And this approach is not utopian, or heretical, or revolutionary, or Bolshevik, or vanguardist, but rather constitutionally orthodox, democratic, capitalist, and middle-class ... It has its origin in the liberal ideas which inspire the constitutional Statues of all the demo-middle class States...

Consistent with my ideological position, I think that the time for attempting in the liberal method, the individualistic formula in Peru has now passed. Leaving aside doctrinal reasons, I fundamentally consider the following incontestable and concrete factor to give a special nature to our agricultural problem: the survival of the community and of practical socialism in the lives and agriculture of the Indigenous peoples.

IV. The Changing role of women

In a manner parallel to ethnic relationships, the role of women in Latin America has also changed, with an acceleration of this change in recent years. Through the Colonial period and much of the National period, relationships between the sexes were defined mainly by the concept of "machismo", and the related idea of "marianismo".

Machismo is the exaggerated predominance taken by the male in Latin American society. The term is derived from the word "macho", which is literally "a male animal". It is a celebration of man's social and sexual predominance, power and virility. It has its roots in medieval notions of chivalry and honor and in the need for males to give special protection to women. In its less benevolent aspects it can become male aggressiveness and the felt need to control women. Tellingly, a romantic affair is frequently described by a Latin male as a "conquest" of the female. The Iberian Colonial systems had legal, religious and economic provisions which insured that women were kept in a subordinate status. It was common for women to have to get the permission of their fathers or husbands to acquire real estate or to travel abroad.

Marianismo is a related term derived from the Virgin Mary, and it portrays women as sexually pure, spiritually superior, and morally above men. Women are thus seen as the guardians of values and propriety, especially in the family circle. As good mothers and wives they are required to be tolerant and forgiving of the strayings of their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands, who are the bearers of the "macho" tradition.

These two inter-related cultural traditions for centuries worked to keep women in their assigned place. For upper class women this meant the home (as daughter or mother), with very few professional alternatives, the convent being the principal one. Middle and lower class women had somewhat greater social and economic freedom, but their activities were usually linked to their husband's profession in an assisting capacity (farmworker, small landowner, shopkeeper, craftsman, etc).

Gradually certain professions opened up to women, with teaching and the health professions being the first. The entry into the world of the office and factory was slow, as was the political arena. Despite these obstacles, extraordinary women have had great impact in Latin America. We can cite as an example the influence of Evita Perón in Argentina, who was a key factor in the rise to power of her husband Juan Perón in 1943, and who played an important role in transforming Argentina until her early death in 1952 at age 33. Among other things, she was responsible for the woman's vote and for initiating social legislation which greatly benefited the urban worker and marginalized groups in Argentina.

In the world of letters women have always played a role, going back as far as Sor Juana in the Colonial era, although the small number of women authors up until the 20th Century suggests that it was difficult for women to break through society's restrictions in order to find the freedom to express themselves through the arts. The first Latin American winner of a Nobel Prize for literature was the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, and poetry of high esthetic and sensual quality has been written by authors such as Delmira Agustini.

Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889-1957)

The first Nobel Literature prize-winner in Latin America, Mistral was a poet of chaste love and sadness. Her early poems dealing with love and tragedy were the product of her first love, a young man who killed himself, apparently over a financial problem. This great tragedy in Mistral's life, at the age of twenty, was the inspiration for "Sonnets of Death". She never married, and eventually the tragic love of her youth slowly slipped into the mists of time until Mistral admitted she no longer could remember the face of her lover.

Her love then becomes focused on children, sometimes her imaginary babies, sometimes the children of friends, and sometimes her students. Love becomes maternal, but with a tinge of sadness over not ever being able to have her own children. But religion was always present to console her. She was a school teacher for many years, first in the rural environment in which she grew up (she started to teach at age thirteen), and then later in the Ministry of Education, where her imaginative ideas (including the use of visual aids) influenced several generations of Chilean teachers. The tenderness, the beauty and the simplicity of her poems won her worldwide acclaim, and in 1945 she received the Nobel Prize. She carried out various diplomatic and cultural assignments for her government and various international organizations. She taught and lectured in various US universities, and died in New York in 1957.

Because of the simplicity and directness of her poetry, Mistral fits within the "post-modernist" (or "anti-modernist") current of 20th Century Latin American literature.

"Rocking" by Gabriela Mistral

The sea with its thousands of waves

rocks, divine.

Listening to the loving seas,

I rock my baby.

The errant wind in the night

rocks the wheat.

Listening to the loving winds,

I rock my baby.

God the Father his thousands of worlds

rocks without a sound.

Feeling his hand in the shadow

I rock my baby.

"Great Dream" by Gabriela Mistral

Like a child sleeping

don't make me think of it.

He slept thus in my inner self

with much lassitude.

I took him out of the dream

and all his wishes,

and now he has gone back

to sleep again.

His forehead is upright

and his temples too.

His feet are two mussels

and his sides are fish.

I can hear his breathing

like running water;

his eyelashes flutter

like leaves of the maiten tree.

I tell them to leave him

well alone just as he is

until he wakes

by his own desire...

His sleep is aided

by the roof and the door frame.

the Earth who is Cybele,

the mother who is woman.

I wish I could learn

to sleep since I have forgotten

and one learns so many

unfaithful things when awake.

And we go on sleeping

as a gift from him,

this dream is a great one

until the dawning...

"The Sonnets of Death" by Gabriela Mistral

1 From the cold niche in which men placed you,

I will bring you down to the warm and humble earth.

They did not know that I will sleep there

and that we will dream on the same pillow.

I will lay you down in the sunny earth with a

mother's sweetness for her sleeping child,

and the earth will be the cradle's softness

when it receives your pained child's body.

Later I will sprinkle soft dust and rose powder,

and in the light blue dust of the moon,

the airy remains will become imprisoned.

I will leave singing my beautiful revenges

because in that hidden depth no one's hand

will enter to dispute with me your handful of bones!

2 This long fatigue grows greater each day,

and the soul will tell the body that it will not go on

dragging its mass along the rosy path,

where humans walk, happy with living...

You will sense their brisk digging next to you,

when another sleeping one comes to the quiet city.

I will wait until they have covered me fully...

and then we will talk for an eternity!

Only then you will understand why, young

your still strong flesh and bones

had to go down, untired, to sleep.

Light will shine on your destiny, now dark;

you will know that our alliance was made in the stars

and, the enormous covenant broken, you had to die...

3 Evil hands took your life since the day

when, at a signal of the stars, you left the nursery

covered with lilies. All flourished in delight.

But evil hands tragically entered it...

I said to the Lord: "By all the mortal paths

they take him. Beloved shadow which they know not how to guide!

Pull him away, Lord, from those fatal hands

or sink him in that long sleep you know how to bestow!

I cannot shout out, I cannot follow him!

His ship is pushed along by the dark wind of storm.

Return him to my arms or cut him down in the flower of youth."

The rosy ship of his life halted...

Who says that I do not know of love, that I had no pity?

You, who will judge me, will understand, Lord!

"I have no solitude" by Gabriela Mistral

The night is desolation

from the mountains to the sea.

But I, who rock you,

I have no solitude!

The sky is desolation

if the moon falls into the sea.

But I, who hold you,

I have no solitude!

The world is desolation

and the flesh sadly goes.

But I, who hug you,

I have no solitude!

"Bread" by Gabriela Mistral

They left bread on the table,

half burned, half white,

squeezed on top and opened

with brilliant white crumbs.

It seems new or never seen to me,

and something else that he has not fed me,

but turning over the crust, as if asleep,

I have forgotten its feel and smell.

It smells of my mother as she breast-fed me,

it smells of three valleys I have traveled:

Aconcagua, Pátzcuaro, Elqui,

and of my inner soul when I sing.

There are no other smells in the farm

and that is why it has called me thus;

nor is there anyone in the house

but that bread opened up on the plate,

who with its body recognizes me

and I with mine recognize it.

It has been eaten in all climates

the same bread in a hundred brothers;

bread of Coquimbo, bread of Oaxaca,

bread of Santa Ana and of Santiago.

In my infancy I knew

the shape of the sun, the fish, or the halo,

and my hand knew its crumb

and the warmth of the feathered chick...

Then I forgot it until this day

in which the two of us found each other,

I with my body of old Sara

and he with his of five years.

Dead friends with whom I have eaten it

in other valleys feel the vapor

of a bread milled in September

and in a Castilian August reaped.

It is another, the one we ate

in lands where they laid down.

I open the bread and give them its warmth;

I turn it over and I give them its breath.

My hand is full with it

and I look upon my hand;

I let out a repentant cry

for forgetting so many years,

and my face becomes aged

or is reborn with this discovery.

Since the house is empty

let us, the re-found ones, be together,

on this table without meat or fruit,

the two in this human silence,

until we shall once again be one

and our day has reached its end...

"The sleepless one" by Gabriela Mistral

As the night thickens

and the standing lie down,

and the surrendered straighten out,

I hear him climb the stairs.

It matters not that they do not hear him

and only I sense him.

Why should he be heard

by the sleeplessness of another servant!

In a breath of mine he climbs

and I suffer until he arrives

a crazy cascade which his destiny

sometimes drops and others climbs

and a crazy feverish thorn

knocks like castanets against my door.

I don't get up, I don't open my eyes,

and I follow his whole form.

An instant, like the damned,

under the night we have a truce;

but I hear him go down again

as if in an eternal tide.

He comes and goes all night long

an absurd gift, given and returned,

a medusa lifted by the waves

who now goes away, and now comes near.

From my bed I help him

with the breath I still have left,

to keep him from searching aimlessly

or hurting himself in the shadows.

The steps of silent wood

echo like glass to me.

I know on which ones he rests,

and asks himself, and answers himself.

I hear where the faithful wood,

like my soul, creaks for him,

and I know his mature and final step

which was going to come and never comes...

My house suffers his body

like a flame that toasts him dark.

I feel the warmth of his face

-burning brick- against my door.

I test an unknown saying:

I suffer life, I die alert,

and in this trance of death's agony

my strengths ebb with his strengths!

The next day I rest in vain

with his cheeks and my tongue

tracing the fogged glass

in the mirror of the stairs.

And my soul is calmed a few hours

until the blind night falls.

The vagabond who crosses it

tells it to me like a fable.

He only barely carries his flesh,

he is only a little of what once was,

and the look in his eyes

sometimes chills and sometimes burns.

If you see him, don't question him;

just tell him not to return,

that his memory should not ascend,

so that he may sleep and I may sleep.

Kill the name which like the wind

In its routes darkens

And not look upon my door,

erect and red like a bonfire!

Delmira Agustini (Uruguay, 1886-1914)

She too was a poet of love, but of a very different tone from Mistral's. Agustini grew up in a well-to-do Uruguayan family and was educated at home by tutors. She could read and write by age four, and by ten was writing verses. Her short life was tragic: she married young and divorced almost immediately (she returned from her honeymoon with the remark that she found the experience extremely boring). But she continued to see her former husband, and in one of their secret meetings in a hotel her husband killed her and then himself.

Agustini's poetry is frankly and openly erotic, although it is always accompanied by expressions of spiritual love. She dedicated some of her work to Eros, the god of love, but the depth of her feeling has suggested a comparison with mystical poets such as Saint Teresa of Avila. The intensity of her spiritual and physical love is clearly evident in her poetry and finds form in the esthetic nature of her work.

"Wings" by Delmira Agustini

I had...two wings!...

Two wings

That in Azure lived like two sidereal roots...

Two wings,

with all the miracles of life, of death

and of illusion. Two wings,

thundering

like ships sails in a fugitive star;

two wings,

like two firmaments

with storms, with calm and with stars...

Do you remember the glory of my wings?

The golden ringing of the bells

the rhythm, the unspeakable

shades of stored-up treasure

all Iris, but a new Iris

obscuring and divine,

who will be adored by the plain pupils of the Future

(The pupils matured in full light!)... the flight...

The burning flight, devouring and unique,

which for a long time tormented the skies,

and awoke suns, meteors, storms,

gave brilliance to the rays and the stars;

and the amplitude: had

warmth and shade for all the World,

and even could incubate a beyond.

One rare day

fainting to earth,

I slept in the plush depths of this forest...

I dreamed divine things!...

A smile of yours awoke me, I think...

And I could not feel my wings!...

My wings?...

I saw them fall apart between my arms...

It was like a thaw!

"Nocturne" by Delmira Agustini

Linked in the night to the lake of your soul,

one could say a weaving of glass and of calm

knitted by the great spiders of sleeplessness.

Cream of sacrificial water in vases of alabaster;

mirror of purity which gives brilliance to the stars

and reflects the chasm of Life in a sky...

I am the errant swan of the bloody trails

and I go staining the lakes and soaring into flight.

"Your Love" by Delmira Agustini

Your love, slave, is like a very strong sun:

golden gardener of life,

fiery gardener of death,

and the prolific poem of my life.

Crow's beak with odor of roses,

sweet stinger of delight

your tongue is. Your mysterious hands

are claws gloved with caresses.

Your eyes are cruel midnights,

black honeycombs of cursed sweetness

which exhaust themselves in my harshness;

chrysalis of a future flight

in your magnificent and dark embrace

bewitched tower of my solitude.