Maneuvering Time and Place: The Poetry of Manuel Maples Arce

Manuel Maples Arce was a driving force in the modernization of Mexican poetry in the 1920s. His Estridentismo was an energetic avant-garde movement that brought the Mexican Revolution to the arts, and the Mexican literary community into the 20th century. Maples' poetry, spanning more than six decades, is of a value that should create for him a respected place among the prominent Latin American poets of the 20th century. In this study, historical literary references and connections are made to aid the reader in placing Maples Arce's work in context to gauge his merit and to justify his place in Hispanic letters. The introduction to the historical avant-garde provides the necessary background and context, especially for the English-language readership, and an overview of Estridentismo is included both for the sake of information and to rectify errors and omissions in some past criticism. It is the aim of this study to illustrate the cohesiveness and the trajectory of Maples Arce's poetry. The persona or protagonist in these poems, the yo, appears to be a poet, and may or may not be an autobiographical Maples Arce. He goes from Cubist poems that present life in the jazz age and modern inventions, to somber existential poems that show the creative force of art across history, to carefully crafted sonnets that ponder mortality, and a dialogue interacting with Hamlet. In a world where nothing seems to last, where everything seems to slip through his hands, the protagonist of the poems strives to overcome separation and transitoriness, to achieve union and permanence: this is the main issue in Maples Arce's poetry. The poems present in a variety of ways the protagonist's situations of loneliness and separation from a loved one, and often a sense of dissociation from some ideal harmonious world, even in the midst of exciting modernity. This close study of the poems, with textual analysis, is absolutely necessary in order to gain a true understanding of Maples contribution to modern poetry. The analysis of the poems presents the idea of a destruction/creation dichotomy or cycle which spans the Maples Arce poetic work. An examination of the complete poetry, as collected in Las semillas del tiempo, (for a bilingual Spanish-English edition see Stockcero, 2022, ISBN 978-1-949938-16-6) shows how this thematic thread runs through all of the poems and explains the continuity which exists from beginning to end of the Maples Arce career. The study shows the maturation and evolution of an accomplished poet, whose work has withstood the test of time and belongs among the best of the century.