SOURCE: "Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal," in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 648-71.

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

Perhaps the subject of political poetry is so inextricable from specific poems and poets at particular historical moments that one can discuss only examples. Ernesto Cardenal is an interesting one, not least because the cause for which he long spoke, the release of the Nicaraguan peasantry from the oppressive burdens of economic exploitation and arbitrary rule by force, was victorious; the Sandinista victory gave him an opportunity, or an obligation, to become a poet of praise and victory after he had been a poet of compassion and wrath:

In Latin America Cardenal is generally regarded as an enduring poet. He brought a recognizably Latin American material into his...