In the following essay, Gibbons critically examines Cardenal's expression of his political views through his poetry.

In the following essay, Gibbons places Cardenal within the context of Latin American politics and examines the major themes of his political poetry.

In the following essay, Pring-Mill traces the development of Cardenal's life and poetry, and relates this growth and change to his portrayal of Native American peoples in Homenaje a los indios americanos.

In the following interview, Cardenal discusses his literary influences, his religious conversion, and his views on Nicaraguan politics.

In the following essay, Elias discusses the themes of religion and political struggle as expressed through Cardenal's focus on prophecy and Latin-American history in his poetry.

In the following essay, Valdés examines the development of the theme of prophesy throughout Cardenal's poetry.

In the following essay, Cohen explores the development of Cardenal's sense of social commitment as expressed through his poetry.

In the following essay, Schaefer-Rodriguez analyzes Cardenal's response to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 as it is expressed through his poetry.

In the following essay, DeHay assesses Cardenal's synthesis of Christianity and Marxism as expressed in the poetry in Salmos.

In the following essay, Cohen compares representations of the United States in the poetry of Cardenal and of the Haitian poet René Depestre.

In the following essay, Williams explores Cardenal's use of historical documents in El estrecho dudoso.

In the following essay, Williams analyzes the epic structure and subject matter of El estrecho dudoso, maintaining that the poem is both secular and religious.

In the following interview, Cardenal discusses his role as minister of culture in Nicaraguan politics and his opinions on popular culture.

In the following essay, Valdés discusses the cinematic images and techniques Cardenal utilizes in his poem "Oráculo sobre Managua."

All Cardenal's poetry "debunks," "corroborates," and "mediates" reality. His esthetic principles are clearly ethical, and most of his poems are more than just "vaguely" religious. (p. ix) [All] eight texts of Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems set out to "document" reality (and so redeem it) in a … dialectically visual way: picturing things, peoples, and events in the light of a clear-cut sociopolitical commitment; select...

Upon reading [Ernesto Cardenal's poetry] and being hit on the head by the striking and continuous similarities to Pound's poetry in so much of Cardenal's work, you do not get the impression that he is a young poet feeling his way, learning through imitation; these are not the first, promising efforts of a budding genius. You do not get the impression that he is going on to something else, to "find his own voice," etc. No. This is it. This is his own voice, and these poems ...

In the essay below, Barrow provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Cardenal's psalms.

[Ernesto Cardenal's] long narrative poem, El estrecho dudoso (1966), has not been adequately studied to date as an artistic whole. Like Pablo Neruda … in Canto General (1950), Cardenal employs the epic form in his poem to effectively criticize the socio-political realities of Nicaragua prior to the overthrow of the Somoza regime while recreating the traditional history of the colonization of Central America by viewing it as a search for social justice as much as an attempt to find an inland ch...

In the following review, Galeano describes The Doubtful Strait as an epic poem of Latin America's early colonial history that offers a moral lesson regarding contemporary social struggles.

The Preface to a volume of poems by Ernesto Cardenal, entitled Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, says bluntly about the poet that he "is a Catholic Priest and a Marxist poet, and he sees no conflict between these two loyalties." And the poems in this volume, long works that read in English like amalgams of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg, amply demonstrate the fusion in his mind of these two institutions, the Church of Rome and the Leninist dogmas of atheistic di...

A Psalter for those who live in the last third of the twentieth century has to be more than a collection of pretty hymns. It has to be a collection of cries that help to express our anguish, our embarrassment at being human, and our sense of awe at both the glory and the grimness of human life. Ernesto Cardenal is a Nicaraguan poet who understands what the Psalms are and what they mean to this generation…. [His] rendition of the Psalms [Psalms of Struggle] is not the work of a contemplative but of a ...

The poems of Ernesto Cardenal collected in Zero Hour … will interest many readers in the United States less as poetry than as political commentary. These verses … describe events leading up to the revolution in Nicaragua and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979…. [Despite Cardenal's] adherence to the "theology of liberation," he accepts the late Mao Zedong's view that "revolutionary art without artistic value has no revolutionary value.�...

[Cardenal's] first major work, Hora 0 (Zero Hour), and Epigrams, emerge from the 'tropical nights of Central America', an atmosphere thick with dictators, misery and injustice. His anger and his reasons for it are comparable with Neruda's in Canto general. But his satire has, precisely, an epigrammatic quality and relies less on exposed feelings than on an exposing intelligence, as in his lines on the dictator of Nicaragua: 'Somoza unveils the statue of Somoza in the Somoz...

Except for [Cardenal's] earliest verses which were modeled on Ruben Dario and Neruda, Whitman and Pound are his principal forbears. As with Whitman, there is less compression than extension in Cardenal's most successful poems. The effects usually depend on increment to uncover depth; and the poem is meant to be public, an open window bearing the naked heart. From Pound (whom he translated, and whose influence he has acknowledged), Cardenal derived his method of incorporating disparate matter i...

[Homage to the American Indian] celebrates the spiritual strengths of the American Indian and confesses the spiritual weaknesses of modern America. In a torrent of images and phrases ripped out of context, Cardenal juxtaposes fragments of ancient American life with fragments of modern American life. His technique is that of the documentary film maker who juxtaposes two opposing points of view in such a way that the viewer is encouraged to choose one, in Cardenal's case the ancient American. (pp. 85-6...

Cardenal patterned his later work after the texts of Ezra Pound, flawed champion of the "documentary" poem. Behind Pound stood Dante, whose cries against encroaching merchant capitalism expressed the spirit of old radical Christianity. Pound hated the modern order but tripped on his fondness for rigid societies (ancient China, fascist Italy) where, he imagined, poets earned special favor. Cardenal has freed himself from this last artistic vanity…. Without illusions about some Golden Age...

In Cuba has been called reportage for want of exact definition. It is more than that. It is the compendium of Cardenal's far-ranging impressions during visits to the island in 1970 and 1971. If we must define things by genre, the closest we can come to is the form practiced in Brazil called the crônica (chronicle), which is freer than the essay and broader than journalism, the form used, indeed, by so many of the first Europeans who came to the New World and wrote down their impressions. The C...

[Cardenal] is both naive and subtle in his notes on Cuba [In Cuba]. It is as if St. Francis of Assisi were jotting things down, and St. Francis Borgia were editing the jottings. He praises the Cubans … and is impressed because everyone gets the same rations, just as in wartime England, or in China until the food situation eased in the 1960's. He repeats three or four times that over 100,000 people voluntarily gave blood for disaster victims in Peru (in the U.S. press, only Castro's gift...

An excellent free verse translation presents … [Cardenal's] poems of lost American Indian civilizations [Homage to the American Indians]. The poetry is clear, lean, and proselike, making effective use of alliteration, repetition, and allusion. Its sharp imagery focuses upon vanished Indian worlds …, contemporary destructive forces …, and our need for contact with the wellsprings of Indian vitality…. Cardenal's eloquent, evocative poetry is fit homage to the rich her...