Poetry Criticism | Guillén, Nicolás - Richard L. Jackson (essay date 1979)

Richard L. Jackson (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "The Turning Point: The Blackening of Nicolás Guillén and the Impact of his Motivos de son," in Black Writers in Latin America, University of New Mexico Press, 1979, pp. 80-92.

[In the following essay, Jackson discusses Guillén's rejection of the white literary aesthetic and his development of a black sensibility in his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on the volumes Motivos de son, Sóngoro cosongo, and West Indies, Ltd. Jackson maintains that Guillén "represents the major turning point for literary blackness in Latin America. "]

Nicolás Guillén, … had his "white" stage, but … has lived long enough to pass through it and to go on to become the premier black poet writing in Spanish. Guillén's earlier poetry was definitely non-black and largely inconsequential, of interest to contemporary readers only as illustrations of his early expertise and...

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