SOURCE: Cussen, Antonio. “Poetry Visits America.” In Bello and Bolívar: Poetry and Politics in the Spanish American Revolution, pp. 96-126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Cussen examines Bello's short-lived but significant Spanish language journal Biblioteca Americana, and provides a close reading of his poems “Alocución” and “Agricultura”—two poems singing the praises of Spanish American history and its heroes.

Besides, a fate attends on all I write, That when I aim at praise, they say I bite. 

Alexander Pope

The first issue of the Biblioteca Americana, published in July 1823, was a lavish volume of 470 pages with several color plates of scenes of the New World. Opposite the first page is a lithograph showing a woman in classical attire who is visiting an Indian woman with naked breasts and feathers on her head. The Indian woman is surrounded by palm trees and is sitting...