Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

As a Latino American acutely conscious of his family’s roots in Puerto Rico, Espada’s writing must be read not only in the context of American English language and literary history, but it must also be read in the context of Latino literary history and Spanish language figures. His most notable influence is Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose work Espada has taught and about which he has published essays. Neruda, the great Chilean poet, famously championed the concerns of the oppressed in passionate free verse poems earning him a worldwide following and the Nobel Prize in 1971. Alongside his poetry, Neruda held a deep and active commitment to leftist politics, serving as a diplomat in the socialist government of Salvador Allende before Allende’s ousting by the US-backed dictator Pinochet. Espada shares Neruda’s commitment to the function of poetry as an act of memorial for those whose voices could not be heard in life and would otherwise be forgotten in death. Like Neruda, who saw the same injustice afflicting the poor in numerous Latin American countries, Espada explicitly aims for a poetry that goes beyond the boundaries of the United States. In other, more recent poems, he has written about the devastation caused by hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the deaths of migrants crossing the border into the US from Mexico. Espada identifies himself as “a poet of advocacy” (Thomson, Gabriel. “Against Oblivion.” Interview with Martin Espada, Poetry Foundation, 2018.), showing the influence of Neruda in explicitly combining poetry with politics.

Alongside this Latino legacy, Espada’s poetry also has a clear lineage from that most canonical of American poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Whitman is often known as “the father of free verse,” and his Leaves of Grass laid the foundations for an acceptance of a verse style less bound by formal tradition and often addressing the reader in direct, plain language. This democratic, universal, experience-based poetry was Whitman’s radical legacy to American poets of the 20th century. It is a legacy that Espada builds on, yet where Whitman’s poetry tends to be more personal or filled with awe at nature (of which a classic example would be “I Saw in Louisiana, a Wide Oak Growing”), Espada writes of factories, urban poverty, and injustice. This might seem bleak, but his work still has a Whitmanesque core of optimism and a faith in the idea of poetry as redemption. Espada has acknowledged this himself, commenting that “poetry becomes an antidote to despair” (Thomson, Gabriel. “Against Oblivion.” Interview with Martin Espada, Poetry Foundation, 2018.).