Jose Marti and U. S. Writers. Foreword by Roberto Fernandez Retamar.
first edition
2003 · Gainesville, FL
by Fountain, Anne.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, (2003). First Edition. Octavo, hardcover (tan cloth & coral boards), xiv + 153 pp. Fine. From Foreword: Jose Marti would never have agreed with the concept, now popular again, that civilizations are ever doomed to clash with each other. In 1894, using reasoning that harks back to the time of the Stoics if not before he claimed categorically that to speak of nationhood is to speak of humanity. In the upheavals of his own life, he had come to understnad that civilizations can and should sustain each other. Thus he labled the part of our planet, where he happened to have been born, and to which he dedicated his life, Our Mestizo America. Bearing this in mind, it is reasonable to assume that he would have enthusiastically welcomed the multiculturalism currently in vogue in the United Staets. Marti’s relationship with the United Staets, where he lived in exile for some fifteen years, is enduring proof of this. However, Marti’s intimate and complex relationship with the United States has not yet been adequately studied. At the beginning of this book, Anne Fountain characterizes that relationship succinctly when she says that Marti’s whole interpretation of the United States was a largely negative view of politics and policians tempered by an enthusiastic embrace of poets and poetry. The great poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, an authoritative spokesman for his era, wrote that Spain and Spanish Americans were deeply indebted to [Marti] for opening up their access to U. S. poetry. Hence the importance of this study... (Inventory #: els2668)