SOURCE: "Nicolás Guillén between the son and the Sonnet," in Callaloo, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 318-28.

In the essay below, Pérez-Firmat discusses Guillén's use of the son and sonnet forms, stating that Guillén imposed "poetic form on native rhythms" with the son and infused "traditional form with indigenous vitality" with the sonnet

Nicolás Guillén, best-known as a composer of sones, has also favored the sonnet. Although the fame of the author of Sóngoro cosongo (1931) rests primarily on his innovative nativist verse, from his earliest poems Guillén has shown a special predilection for traditional poetic forms, and particularly for the sonnet. Indeed, almost half of the poems written before Motivos de son (1930) are sonnets. His first collection, Cerebro y corazón, completed in 1922 but not published until 1965, already contains twenty-two of these compositions. In Guillén's literary career, the sonnet...