Phone: (740) 368-3684

E-mail: jcballon@cc.owu.edu

José C. Ballón

Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature

Department of Modern Foreign Languages

Ohio Wesleyan University

Office : University Hall 318-D

Delaware, OH 43015

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The study explores the literary influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on José Martí from his arrival in New York in 1880 onward. Although separated by language and by their intellectual traditions, both authors portray the Americas as emancipated from Europe culturally as well as politically. The literary analysis describes the intertextual connection of the poetry and prose of Martí with Emerson's writings. Among the texts studied are the essays "Emerson" and "El poema del Niágara," and two books of poems, Ismaelillo and Versos sencillos.

This study describes how the Cuban patriot and writer José Martí incorporated Emerson's English discourse and literary symbols into his own Spanish writings. It also presents and comments on the notations made by Martí on John Rae's book Contemporary Socialism (1887), which Ballón discovered while doing research in Cuban libraries in 1991. The main objective of his work is to document, at the textual level, how Martí assimilated two major currents of thought present in the USA at end of the 19th-Century: Transcendentalism (Emerson) and European Socialism (Lassalle/Marx).