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Latin American Poetry

the background of a long-and many-strandedliterary and rhetorical tradition, which has its own conventional modes of viewing events and its conventional techniques for representing what the poets seeing eye selects. Conventions are always handy things to have around: Bernard Berenson once called them ' shortcuts to effective communication ', and this kind of poetry is nothing if not communication. Although its conventions have grown prodigiously in the last thirty years, their antecedents go a long way back, for its roots lie in the songs and poetry of the various independence movements. The basic language of praise and dispraise the epic epithets, the turns of phrase, even stock-similes and heightening allusions to heroic precedent largely goes back to that earlier period of committed poetry, with modern additions gaining currency because they enter an accepted system for referring to events which move both the protest poets and their audience. The ideologies may have changed, but many of the issues were already burning ones in the Independence period: tyranny, exploitation, brutality, atrocities (not all one-sided) versus the laudable and duly lauded-heroism, nobility, self-sacrifice, and courage of those who fought on the same side as the poet. The more burning the issue, the more one's protest poet tends to burn: his reactions may or may not be constructive, but they will almost certainly be to some extent emotional, ranging from blind rage through indignation to despair, or elegiac sorrow. Such emotions are generally still too close to boiling point to have been ' recollected in tranquillity'. But since such poetry is meant to rouse its readers (often with a view to action), tranquillity seems out of place to both the poets and their audience: total involvement and a sense of urgency are far more relevant. The results can be extremely powerful, when the emotions have been adequately harnessed by well-disciplined technique: not ' tranquillised', but properly controlled. No one would deny that many published protest poems are failures, but their failure-rate is unlikely to be any higher than the failure-rate of the Elizabethan sonnet: the more successful ones effectively outlast the time-bound situations which the poet set out to depict and change. Robert Pring-Mill