Ernesto Cardenal | Biography

Along with Nicanor Parra and José Emilio Pacheco, Ernesto Cardenal is one of the most renowned poets living in Latin America. Cardenal has established his distinctive mark on poetry during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for his nonmetaphorical, realist language and the collage technique, and for the predominance of sociopolitical and religious topics in his lengthy poems. Influenced to some degree by the poetic style of Ezra Pound--but not, it should be emphasized, by Pound's fascist politics--Cardenal developed his own aesthetic theory about poetry: Exteriorismo (exteriorism). He created this theory in opposition to the reigning aesthetic hermeticism (or Interiorismo) advocated by two well-known members of the 1940s generation, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez and Carlos Martínez Rivas. Interiorism remained enveloped in the poetic tradition and claimed no direct references to history or the sociopolitical situation in Nicaragua. Martínez Rivas's La insurrección solitaria (The Solitary Insurrection, 1953) represents the culminating moment of interiorism...
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