Biografía:
Enrique Gonzalez Martinez is considered Mexico's best poet of his time. His contribution to lyrical poetry was soon recognized. In 1912 at the early age of 31, he was elected president of the Youth Fraternity whose members quickly pointed at him as their great teacher. In Mexican poetry at the time –between 1911 and 1925- he reached the highest pinnacle. His fame grew so much that even Lopez Velarde –a man who appears to be miles away from him- said: “Among many others, I owe my knowledge to him.”Much has been discussed about the classification of Martinez's poetry. In some of his poems, modernism is the name of the game. In The Man of the Owl, the poet says modernism accepted the enrichment of metric forms, the resurrection of long forgotten chaste methods, freedom of rhythm and stimulus to graciousness. Some critics pencil him in as the poet that, unlike Ruben Dario, replaced the ornamental swan for the owl that symbolizes introspection. In a 1941 article entitled Twist the Swan's Neck and published in Romance magazine, the author cleared out the discrepancy about his famous sonnet. He wrote: “Dario is a poet I've always looked up at, a feeling that accrues inside of me with each passing year.”Gonzalez Martinez opted for the internal and substantial rather than the modernist perfectionism. He dug out the hidden meaning of things; he followed dark trails and tried to hone his soul to the point of listening to the sound of silence and watching the shadows, of capturing the rhythm of deep life. He mulled over “the endless mystery of nighttime jungle” and warned to “search a soul and a hidden meaning in all things, to piously take off the sandals to avoid hurting the rocks on the road.”His work is amazingly well structured, though in Babel, a poem that surfaced in 1949 some forty-six years after the appearance of Preludes, the author has a different tone. This is a book in which the poet no longer talks with the universe, but rather exhales his pain in the face of the immense tragedy caused by World War II. In tormented 1915, a year of famine and anguish in Mexico, he published his book entitled Death of the Swan and the second edition of The Hidden Trails.Gonzalez Martinez was recognized as the great poet. His works –made up of twenty volumes plus compilations and anthologies- irradiates talent galore.The beauty of Enrique Gonzalez Martinez's work, calmly classic within a moment of modernism, is and will always be a cornerstone of Mexican literature.
