The Poetics of Disenchantment: José María Heredia and the

Tempests of Modernity

Raúl Coronado

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 1,

Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 184-189 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2013.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/504855

For content related to this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/related_content?type=article&id=504855
184 New Sitings and Soundings for Transnational Poetics

J19
Nineteenth-­Century American Women’s Poetry (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press,
2004); Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004); Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading
(Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005); Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood,
Per­for­mance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–­1917 (Hanover, NH: University Press of
New En­gland, 2005); Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans
to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Meredith L. McGill, ed., The
Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-­Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Augusta Rohrbach, ed., “Special Issue: Poetry,” ESQ 54 (2008);
Kerry Larson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-­Century American Poetry (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Christopher N. Phillips, Epic in American Culture:
Settlement to Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
4. Two important exceptions are Deborah Jenson’s chapter on lyric, libertinage, and
“courtesan rap” in her book Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the
Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 277–­302; and Lloyd Pratt,
“The Lyric Public of Les Cenelles,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer
Cohen and Jordan Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 253–­73.
5. A de­cade on, we still await work comparable to Silva Gruesz’s groundbreaking Ambas-
sadors of Culture (2002).
6. The most notable exception is the critical and anthologizing work of Robert Dale
Parker.
7. See Meredith McGill’s innovative work on “format,” in “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” in Langer and Stein, Early African American Print
Culture, 53–­74.
8. On new lyric studies, see Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” PMLA 123.1 (2008):
181–­87. On historical poetics, see Yopie Prins, “Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and the Science
of En­g lish Verse,” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 229–­3 4.
9. See Max Cavitch, “Slavery and Its Metrics,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Nineteenth-­Century American Poetry, ed. Kerry Larson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 94–­112.

The Poetics of Disenchantment:

José María Heredia and the Tempests
of Modernity
Raúl Coronado
University of Chicago

The recent comparative literary study of the important

Americas has produced innovative literary histories that have forced us for
to rethink the relationship between literature and nation-­formation. my
The brief though significant period of trans-­A merican literary camara- quetsion
derie in the early de­cades of the nineteenth century aimed at producing
an inspiring aesthetics for the Americas. Poets, both Spanish and
Anglo-­A merican, read and translated one another’s work.1 This was a
moment of great possibility, matched as well by the flourishing of scien-
tific explorations of the Americas where Spanish and Anglo-­A mericans,
who now simply referred to themselves all as “Americans,” shared with
one another their knowledge of their vast territories. But by the 1830s
 Raúl Coronado · The Poetics of Disenchantment 185

J19

this spirit of brotherhood quickly gave way, on the one hand to US impe-
rial interest and, on the other, to the fragmentation of Spanish America
into competing nations. Yet the epistemological work entailed in the
making of nations required, first, a vaster, far-­reaching rethinking of
the cosmos, one about which Spanish and British America had, from
the very outset of their colonial periods, already diverged. In short, it
required viewing the world not as an immutable order in which every- important
one and everything had its par­tic­u­lar station but as a world that was
imagined and actively produced by humans. In this, the poetry of the
revolutionary Spanish American José María Heredia and his Anglo-­
American translator William Cullen Bryant reveals the metaphysical
crisis in the making of the modern world. It’s through translation, as
we’ll see, that the pathos of disenchantment is best expressed.
The late-­eighteenth-­century Hispanic world—­both Spain and Span-
ish America—­was embroiled in a variety of struggles that sought to
ameliorate the impoverished conditions of the Hispanic Atlantic. But
just as it appeared that the programs of reform would perhaps transform
conditions, a world-­shattering event occurred that would forever alter
the course of reform and revolution.2 In May 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte
invaded Spain and deposed the king. For centuries, the trinity of God,
king, and language had sutured the Hispanic world, serving as the foun-
dation for an imagined community. But now, overnight, they had lost
their sovereign, a loss that forced Hispanics to rethink the nature of
sovereignty. Ensconced in the tradition of Catholic po­liti­cal thought, a
legacy now all but forgotten, Hispanics created Spain’s first modern par-
liament and, by 1812, its first liberal constitution. But the restoration of
the king in 1814 brought an end to this brief period of creative experi-
mentation. The king tore the constitution to shreds, disbanded parlia-
ment, and reinstated authoritarian rule. The Hispanic world would soon
thereafter erupt in a global civil war. In Spanish America, the civil war
would, over the course of the 1810s, become wars of in­de­pen­dence.
Historians have addressed the po­liti­cal history of the wars of in­de­
pen­dence. But what has been discussed less has been the existential
turmoil in which Spanish Americans lived. Many ­were left with great
uncertainty: if the king could be deposed, then what would go next—­
God? In effect, within a short de­cade, the Hispanic world was forced to
confront its torturous pro­cess of disenchantment, of seeing the world
not as a received order but as a produced order. The case for British
America is much more familiar. In short, the pro­cess of dislodging the
authority of God took more than a century, from the sixteenth-­century
186 New Sitings and Soundings for Transnational Poetics

J19

Reformation and the 1688 Glorious Revolution through the late-­

eighteenth-­century British American struggles for sovereignty. Their
histories may have diverged with the Reformation, but now, with in­de­
pen­dence, their paths had met once again.
It is in this context that the trans-­A merican revolutionary poet José
María Heredia arrived in Boston in 1823. Following in the footsteps of
other exiled revolutionaries from throughout the Atlantic world, Here-
dia fled his native Cuba when authorities discovered his participation in
a planned insurrection. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1803, Heredia
spent most of his life throughout the circum-­Caribbean: in Santo Do-
mingo, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. An apparent prodigy, by the age of
six he could translate Horace. By sixteen he had published his poems in
periodicals. Upon his departure for Mexico from Cuba with his family
at age sixteen, his poetry had fused romantic love with love of country.
He returned, once again, to Cuba in 1823. By then, however, the ten-
sions between those who had sought reform within the monarchy and
those supporting in­de­pen­dence had reached a tumult. Heredia barely
escaped a planned uprising and arrived in Boston on December 4.
The two years he spent in the United States ­were formative for Here-
dia. He traveled throughout the Northeast, visited Niagara Falls, where
he wrote his famous ode to the cataract, “Oda al Niágara,” and met many
other prominent Spanish American revolutionaries, including Father Fé-
lix Varela, apparent author of the first Spanish American historical
novel, Jicotencal (Philadelphia, 1826). In New York City in June 1825, he
published his first collection of poetry. But Heredia detested the bitterly
cold winters, and he made his way to the recently established Mexican
republic in 1825, where he continued to write and participate in politics
until his death of tuberculosis on May 7, 1839. In the months prior to his
exile from Cuba, however, when he was not actively participating in un-
derground revolutionary activities, all Heredia could do was watch as
the hurricane of history unleashed its fury on the Antilles, what re-
mained of the Spanish empire in the Americas, during which he penned
one of his moving poems, “En una tempestad: Al huracán.”
The poem captures the modern sublimity of hurricanes. It was
translated by William Cullen Bryant in 1827, though Heredia and Bryant
never met. Yet Bryant’s translation is not literal as much as it is inspired.
In Bryant’s version, the poem captures the tense relation between the
narrator and the personified hurricane’s sublime power to transform the
world. Describing its awful, God-­like ability to marshal walls of water,
Bryant writes that the hurricane’s “voice is heard / Uplifted, among the
 Raúl Coronado · The Poetics of Disenchantment 187

J19

mountains round,” before it comes crashing down and “buries all.” The
hurricane destroys everything in its path, moving “woods and moun-
tains.” Yet amid all this devastation there is, miraculously, a witness:
“And I, cut off from the world, remain, / Alone with the terrible hurri-
cane.” 3 Positioned on land yet at an apparently safe remove, the narra-
tor alone witnesses the remaking of the modern world.
Bryant’s 1827 translation finishes with this last couplet, excising
Heredia’s last stanza. What is more, Bryant’s version erases the narra-
tor’s direct, emotional attachment to the land, as, with the hurricane’s
arrival, the flora tremble and fauna flee in terror. Bryant’s translation
produces, in effect, a self-­contained narrative subjectivity. In Heredia’s
original, the narrator captures in intimate, sensuous detail, for example,
the bull’s response to the tempest’s pending arrival: “¿Al toro no miráis?
El suelo escarban / de insoportable ardor sus pies heridos, / la frente
poderosa levantando, / y en la hinchada nariz fuego aspirando / llama la
tempestad con sus bramidos [Do you not see the bull? Its wounded feet /
clawing at the earth with insufferable fervor: / raising its mighty fore-
head, / and inhaling flames through its flared nostrils, / it calls out to the
tempest with its bellows].” So, too, does the narrator describe in detail
the “small birds trembl[ing]” and the horrified sonorous response of the
“mountains rumbling.” Heredia’s narrator emerges instead contrapun-
tally as a part of the natural world surrounding him. While the flora and
fauna weep and flee in terror, the narrator stands firm and in an almost
childlike manner tauntingly calls out to the tempest: “Gigante de los
aires, te saludo . . . ​! [Giant of the winds, I salute you . . . ​!].” 4
In Bryant’s version, the sensual, material world is described in
Edenic, nostalgic terms: the flora and fauna do not express anguish at
the storm’s imminent arrival. Cut off from the serenity of the mountains
and skies, Bryant’s solipsistic narrator is cast out of Eden: “And I, cut
off from the world, remain, / alone with the terrible hurricane” (em-
phasis added). In effect, Bryant’s version would have the reader inter-
pret the hurricane—­the “terrible” forces of the modern world—­a s an
allegory for humanity’s fall from grace. Yet Heredia’s original couplet
reads differently: “Al fin, mundo fatal, nos separamos: / el huracán y yo
solos estamos [At long last, terrible world, we separate: / the hurricane
and I remain alone]” (emphasis added). The modified nouns are in-
verted; it is the world, not the hurricane, that remains terrible, while the
hurricane emerges as the narrator’s equal, if not superior.
And then Heredia’s poem continues with one last stanza. The nar-
rator faces the storm: “y alzo la frente, de delicia lleno . . . Yo en ti me
188 New Sitings and Soundings for Transnational Poetics

J19

elevo / al trono del Señor [delightfully, I raise my head . . . and on you I

raise myself / to the Lord’s throne].” Poised above the hurricane—­a nd
with these final lines, Heredia’s poem concludes—­the narrator hears
“en las nubes / el eco de su voz; siento a la tierra / escucharle y temblar.
Ferviente lloro / desciende por mis pálidas mejillas, / y su alta magestad
trémulo adoro [in the clouds I hear / the echo of his (the hurricane’s) voice;
I sense the earth / shivering as it hears him. Fervent tears / descending
down my pale cheeks, / and his high majesty tremulously adore].” In
effect, the narrator cannot but emotionally remember the devastation
wrought by the tempest, even while admiring it. Believing in his invin-
cibility, indeed because of his proximity to God, the narrator survives
in the present not by looking beyond the hurricane, past the devasta-
tion, to the rays of light piercing through the receding storm clouds but
rather by remembering the present-­becoming-­past, mourning the dev-
astation of what had been there before, the tearing asunder of his once
far more capacious subjectivity in order to adjust to the possessive
individualism of the modern world. With this spiritual awakening, of
bearing witness and humbly remembering the past, the narrator is able
to act in the present.
Hurricanes have long served Ca­r ib­be­a n writers as a vivid political-­ where
aesthetic trope. In Heredia’s poem, the tempest serves as an allegory fordo we see
the antinomies of modernity, the epistemic shift involved in viewing the this?
world not as a received order but as a produced order. Where once had
existed seemingly immovable “hills [and] beloved forest,” now “the
world becomes dark / and all is confusion, profound horror.” Unlike the
spirit of modernity in more Anglo-­Protestant societies, where progress
and history ostensibly went hand in hand, no such equivalence emerges
in the Hispanic world. Rather, like Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,”
Heredia’s narrator mourns the devastation of progress even while ad-
miring its ability to shape the future. The trope of progress, no matter
how awe inspiring, brought with it the disenchantment of the world. No
longer was it a world produced by God where one found everywhere the
trace of the divine. For now, Heredia and his kinsmen w ­ ere left alone,
without God, and with the hurricane.
Heredia’s poetry, just as much of Spanish American poetry of the
period, has been read in the vein of romantic protonationalism. But this
poem also reveals the even more existentially troubling question of pro-
ducing new sources of metaphysical authority in a world where the order
of things had been destroyed. Reading outside nationalist frameworks, a
careful comparative reexamination of the poetry of this period, along
 Hester Blum and Jason R. Rudy · First Person Nautical 189

J19

with other genres, of course, may reveal the varied paths the Americas
have taken in producing disenchanted, secular worlds.

Notes
1. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino
Writing (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002).
2. See chapter 3 of Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and
Print Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
3. José María Heredia, “The Hurricane,” trans. William Cullen Bryant, in The Talisman
for 1828, ed. William Cullen Bryant et al. (New York: Elam Bliss, 1827).
4. José María Heredia, “En una tempestad: Oda al huracán,” in The Heath Anthology of
American Literature: 1800–­1865, ed. Paul Lauter, vol. B (Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2013),
160–­161; José María Heredia, “In a Tempest: An Ode to the Hurricane,” in Heath Anthology of
American Literature, trans. Raúl Coronado and Armando García, 162–­163.

First Person Nautical:

Poetry and Play at Sea
Hester Blum
The Pennsylvania State University

Jason R. Rudy
University of Mary­land, College Park

The sea has been a siren for writers meditating on

mythic voyages; on dissolution; on the boundaries between different
states of being; on spaces of lawlessness and danger, what Hans Blu-
menberg calls the “immoderate[ness]” of the ocean’s vastness.1 One
might lose oneself in such vastness, come undone, experience revolu-
tions within, question established connections and affiliations. And yet
for all the vast literature about the sea from Homer onward, little atten-
tion has been paid to the surprising amount and variety of literature
written at sea. In this essay we look to poetic production aboard long-­
voyaging Anglo-­A merican ships in order to think about the place of
poetry within nineteenth-­century communities whose circuits ­were at
once prosaic and eccentric. Shipboard poetry, produced in an environ-
ment uncongenial to most forms of inscription, invites us to imagine
archives ungrounded and on the move. The tracklessness of the sea, as
well as the indeterminate sense of being in between one’s home and a
past or future abroad, or perhaps a life of perennial wandering, expands
imaginative possibilities for writers at sea. The archive of shipboard