La Introducción (con’t)
This was followed in rapid succession by several books–Anclas de Oro (Anchors of Gold, 1945); Barro (Mud, 1945); Verbo (Verb, 1947); Creación (Creation, 1951); La Llama Pensativa (The Thoughtful Flame, 1955)–each consisting of poems written at that time, as well as older poems from unpublished books since 1924 and a few that were already published before. His latest book, La Llama Pensativa, was written in 1950, which I learned about one day because Juan Ramón Jiménez had spontaneously given me a copy of Evaristo’s sonnets, calling attention to the high quality of the poetry.
He would later make three trips to Spain in 1953, 1956 and 1958, and although most of his old friends were gone, except for a few like Ramón Ledesma Miranda, he found from the current generation the same warm welcome he had received thirty years prior, both for himself and his new work, which was presented in recitations organized by the University, the Gallego Center in Madrid and other institutions. Many critical reviews were written about Verbo and La Llama Pensativa by Pablo Cabañas, Lyis Morales Oliver and others, and it was agreed that with the publication of the latter, the reviews would be compiled along with a selection of all his work in Antología Poética, edited by the Institute of Hispanic Culture in 1954. Also in Puerto Rico, this work and the complete edition of La Llama Pensativa had prompted many commentaries, some regarding Evaristo’s artistic contribution, like one by Josemiio González when he reviewed Verbo, and another by the poet Francisco Lluch Mora in an article entitled "The Transcendence of Evaristo Ribera Chevremont."
In this introduction I wanted, with some degree of precision, to describe the manner in which his work had been produced, known and judged and, at the same time, explain the difficulties inherent in his poetry that had prevented the understanding and appreciation of his work as a whole. This explanation would need to be supplemented with other biographical data in order to define the originality of the poet and the unity of his diverse writings.
Evaristo Ribera Chevremont was born in Old San Juan in the last decade of the 19th century, probably in 1896. His father, Don Cesáro Ribera de Souto, was a Spaniard, more precisely a Galician from Santiago de Compostela, Galicia’s capital, which still maintains its reputation for being a hotbed of national and international life in Spain. His mother, Dona Mercedes Chevremont y Pizá, was the daughter of a Frenchman from Marseilles and a Spanish woman from Majorca. This background, which would seem to give him a status as a foreigner, makes him a very typical Puerto Rican, nonetheless, since the Galician and Majorcan, and even the French, had contributed large numbers to form the population of The Island. His childhood–narrated in explicit detail in El Niño de Arcilla (The Boy of Clay; 1950), which strictly speaking is not a novel but a moving account of his own life–was essential and definitive in the formation of his character, as well as one of the constant themes in his poetry. He was by nature a delicate and sensitive child, intensely impressionable, living his first five years surrounded by the love of his mother, his grandmother, his black wet nurse Mercedes, his cousin Maria. And yet it felt strange to everyone, and worse, strange to himself. But his eyes and soul were wide open to the influences of the world around him, and his inner solitude was always there as a central component of his character and poetry. He was five when his mother died at twenty-three. It broke up the home. and it began a life for him that was full of sadness and melancholy. He had to learn to be self-sufficient and take refuge in himself, which led him to study and cultivate poetry at a young age–to develop his themes–a process he himself claims to have shaped his spirit. An educated woman of great character, his mother encouraged him to read and taught him to be, as he always was, decent and modest, but also brave and strong against evil. From her he learned a phrase he would never forget, which foretold the lowering of the Spanish flag in Puerto Rico: "Always love Spain, my son."
He attended public schools and continued his secondary education in private schools where he found an excellent Spanish teacher named Don Felipe Janer. He fervently dedicated himself to his studies under very difficult circumstances, having to earn a living while he was studying. At age fifteen he worked at a factory and "from that time"–he says–"my commitment was to the cause of workers around the world." The burdens of his life did not prevent him from reading and writing, up until he embarked on his first journey to Spain, which would last five years.
On his return to Puerto Rico in 1924, he became passionately devoted to journalism and wrote numerous articles that were never collected in a book. Which is a shame, because they would serve not only to better understand his personality as a writer, but to understand the development of post-modern literature in Puerto Rico. He lived in Spain during the post-war literary revolution, which became known as the Ultraist movement, and although he never definitively joined any of the isms of his day, he became a harbinger of new trends in Puerto Rican literature. He contributed to El Imparcial‘s "Avant-garde Page" which unveiled a number of poets to the world who both represented and maintained the interest in the creation of a new art. This work, which cultivated the campaign for a spiritual resurrection of Puerto Rico attracted criticism and resistance. He established a new home with his sister until that too, as with his mother, was broken apart by her death in 1930, which was the theme of his book Tierra y Sombra. He had recently formed his own home by marriage in 1929, and after a few years of silence and concentration followed with a series of poetic works that indicated his fully developed virtuosity.
The themes and formats of his poetry were diverse and seemingly contradictory. It would take too long to analyze them all, Concha Meléndez wrote an entire book to analyze his work up until 1943’s Tonos y Formas (Tones and Shapes). I intend only to say that his contradictions are a byproduct of unity, and therein lies its value. It had already appeared in the books of his adolescence and early adulthood, and was remarked upon by all the critics. Classical, Romantic, Parnassian, Symbolist and Ultramodernist influences all seem to merge together, and they perpetually carry on throughout his work, each element randomly dominating the others. The same has been said of all great American poets, from Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz to Rubén Dario. Again, Ribera Chevremont is a typical case of an American that’s open to all trends.
In regards to his metric style, Evaristo began with sonnets, a form he repeatedly returned to, although he’d soon test many different types of verse, both new and traditional, until it practically became a single form of his finest poetry, with a preference for Alexandrian modernist heroic verse. The Alexandrian sonnet was common at certain times, but some of the other metrics were characteristic of modernism. On the other hand, there’s always an abundance of verse with assonance, preferably octosyllabic, but hendecasyllable and other minor verses are also used. Besides these and other traditional forms, he frequently used different modes of free verse, like the long, enumerative verse that comes from Walt Whitman and post-modernist variations with short lines of text. If some forms link to Spanish-American Modernism, with a background in Classical, Romantic and Parnassian, others will link to the Spanish Modernism of Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, with a background in Becqueriano, and others that connect to a new poetry that’s still in the process of evolving. He is a cultured poet, highly aware of his art, living within the artistic evolution of his time, a series of movements that found momentum from within, regardless of outside influence.
His style is also rich, varied and contradictory. It amalgamates between a wealth of words and difficult imagery, with maximum transparency and simplicity. His aesthetic is one of the dominant themes in his poetry, which is expressed in the tittles of his books–Tonos y Formas, Verbos, Creación–an aspiration to search inside the word and then singing only reality.
The song is sound interior.
The song is the word in harmony.
Notes of worlds unknown, notes
of hidden worlds, trickle and drop
from minds and voices: Poetry.
His work breathes consistent, in spite of the vacillation between aesthetic trends, as the purity of poetry ("the pure voice of my song"), using his voice "to reach the eternal note", and despair "to arrive at the apex of poetry" and that "song free from the weight of meaning", "singing in luminescence, singing from a great height." The purity of his poetry does not, like that from other poets considered pure, exclude real things or feelings or even ideas, but turns them towards their inner world expressed "in clarity and purity", "natural and pure in word", in verse that is "seed" and "living flame", born of dream, "master of essential and mystical poetry", living "in the mystical core of the poem."
All the reality that entered his soul from childhood had gone into the creation of his poetry and merged with the unity of his inner world. That is why it can be misleading to separate his works into different themes. There is no doubt that Spain and Puerto Rico, the sea and nature, animals and trees, wood and mud, love and women, pain and death, silence and solitude, social justice, and more, are subjects of his poetry and should be analyzed individually. But in each poem, we would find the same themes as in the others, and this forms the essential character of his creative work, which consists of the heroic aspiration of his whole life to do what he calls integrated poetry.
For me the essential themes of his poetry, around which are grouped all the others, are two. One is his childhood, the core of his being. "I’m like a diver," he says, "that dives into an endless sea of memories." The sea, which appears in many shapes and shades throughout his poetry, is the same sea he originally envisioned from a balcony as a child, and the wind "the wind of infancy, the same wind."
The trees are
My good friends, linked
to those remote days of games
from my sunny youth.
Pain is
The pain of my life
–which began in infancy–
Pain, not a stranger to my flesh.
You were my teacher.
Speaking of loneliness:
As a child, I loved the solitude.
All these topics and others, sung in numerous poems and sometimes whole books, are complicated by subsequent readings and successive literary techniques, but are always alive in the memory of those initial childhood impressions.
As it says in front of this collection:
At the bottom of the well,
my enchanted childhood!
The other subject that comes up is Spain, already in his first book Desfile Romántico in a sonnet entitled "Spanish Soul." There’s also a sonnet about Don Quioxte, and other celebrated poems in his early books that are dedicated to Spanish figures. They were reproduced in later books, and included in this collection, under dates corresponding to those books. Spain was an influence from early childhood. The Spanish grandmother that lived inside the poems about his family were written later, the theme of romance was born from her teachings.
The songs and fables from infancy were revitalized by his poetry. With them, like so many other things that stem from a common tradition, simultaneously penetrate the worlds of Puerto Rico and Spain. Both worlds are one in "the language that swaddles the words of my cradle" and that history grants him the perspective of the Caribbean Sea from the port of San Juan, and the Atlantic, and the South Sea, as the roads of Spain in America. But only Puerto Rico, which molded him from infancy, is recreated through the various phases of his poetry in the diverse shades and shapes that express multiple aspects of reality: the sea and the port; the streets and trees; the dogs, cats, spiders and toads; the renown, the Black and the Jíbaro; hours of days and nights; all that is wrapped up in the light, the color, the Tropical music. Far removed from the picturesque Costumbrismo style, his view of Puerto Rican reality, in which there is no shortage of sentimental, postmodern musings of the ordinary, is a poetic transfiguration born of dream and memory, which like all of his poetry, seeks to express his inner world through word and song.
This aspiration is another essential theme in Ribera Chevremont’s poetry which, along with his childhood, must be taken into account in order to understand the unity of all the other themes. It is somewhat difficult to define, and the best critics have taken note of the phenomenon in decidedly different ways, calling it "quiet restlessness" (Concha Meléndez), "transcendent yearning for the metaphysical"(Francisco Lluch Mora); "deep philosophical tone; mystical shade of pantheism" (Josemilio González). By then, Mariano Abril had cited the poet’s "idealistic pantheism" in his first critical review. Although Ribera himself has rejected the word "pantheism" accepting instead "mysticism" (which others have rejected), there is in all of these philosophical concepts a common religious and aesthetic bond that is the essence of his poetry, but is not philosophy, nor religion, nor even aesthetics. This latter subject of his poetry is one we’ve already seen; but as in pure thought, his philosophy has little place here, fortunately. The same with religion, which isn’t to say that it didn’t exist in the soul and the life of the author. The originality and value of Ribera Chevermont’s poetry lies in the fact that everything which enters his spirit, both reality and thought, becomes a poetic interior world where all is one, what he calls the "universe in me." Thus, the sea that he had envisioned as a child appears throughout his work with color, music, reality and history, always finding expression in the very foundation of his soul. He and his beloved are identified with the sea.
You, the sea, and me, and she,
are strength, harmony, unity.
All three are full of these "things profound, things inside". His contemplation leads him to feel the existential anguish of a finite existence and the thirst for immortality:
Wave of the infinite in the finite . . .
Wave equal to my thirst for eternal day
and my anxiety to see myself in the finite . . .
And hence, he finds salvation in his dream of climbing to the highest peak:
There is no end to dream, to live in dream,
and go, wave and linking spirit,
towards the great splendor of the stars.
And comes to feel the sea of God, a "sea possessed with the mystery of the world":
God waits for me in the sea. And God calls me.
We see the same in other themes. All of them are resolved in one: "The sole love of the infinite song", and for all the paths to reach God by the word, there is the accent, wing, glow and flame, "voice and light in the poem."
The song that comes to God is by his cadence,
My voice–that voice of mine–lifted
Until God himself, sounds in my singing.
And he feels a victory over loneliness and death. subjects that should also be examined, along with the fire, pain, joy, silence and others that form his poetic universe. They exist in all of his poetry, dominating his rich body work, and are refined in his latest book La Llama Pensativa, where they reach the highest purity and perfection. We should also establish the correlation between his artistic sensibility and the trends of poetry throughout all time. But I think enough has been said to understand the unity, originality and lasting value of one of the greatest poets of our language.
Federico de Onís.