MHC 366
Poetry, Poets, and Politics · 3 credits · Fall 2026
About this course
We will study the poems of three Nobel Prize winners, Chileans Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, Mexican Octavio Paz, and a classic, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories will also be the focus of our study. Considered the most influential Hispano-American poets of the Twentieth Century, the four had devotees and detractors, and they still do. We will study their poems, and visit their lives, friends, enemies, politics, their room-of-one?s-own, their cities and countries, the painters and musicians they admire, the cultural and artistic movements they belong to ? or from which they stayed away ? their politics and public intellectual roles, the tyrants, revolutions, coup d?Etats, American interventions, economic catastrophes that coexisted during their lifetime, their attitude towards them. But mostly, their writings.The four of them are each a Continent. How do their poems, essays, and short stories talk between them, and how do they talk to us today? Does their poetry have anything in common, as they all share the same literary tradition? How much did their education differ? Besides being poets, did they have another profession? Which were their favorite authors? Did they have anything in common (a lesbian, a blind man, a diplomat, and a communist and foodie)?
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