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Abstract

Section xii. The Rivers of the Song of Canto general (1950) is strongly affected by the times. It deals with the years 1948-1949, a time during which the poet lived underground in Chile only to go into exile in Mexico where he finished and published the book. The five poetic letters which make up this section are addressed as letters of friendship and of common political militancy to Miguel Otero Silva, a novelist, a poet, and owner of a journal; Rafael Alberti, the Spanish poet from Cádiz who lived in exile in Argentina; José González Carbalho, an Argentinian poet; Silvestre Revueltas, a Mexican musician, already dead at that time; and Miguel Hernández, the Spanish poet, who died in prison in 1942. These are five letters of friendship: the first is a letter of aknowledgement and excuses for the lateness of the reply; the second one a letter of admiration and eulogy of his poetry; the third one is a eulogy of a poet; the fourth one is the funeral eulogy of a dead Mexican musician; and the last a letter of rancor, impotence, ending with a promise of revenge for the dead poet Miguel Hernández. All of the letters mix friendship, affection, and cosmological vision, with a sense of common militancy and of the chronicle of violence of the times.