Love’s Sanctuaries: Erotic Spatiality and the Agora in Ernesto Cardenal’s <em>Epigramas</em>.

Resumen

This article examines the social dimensions of Ernesto Cardenal's early lyric poetry.  Both the secular erotic text Epigramas, and the religious monastic work Gethsemani KY imagine a dualism between the enclosure created by sincere expressions of erotic love and the agora created by the corrupt materialism of the Somoza regime and modernity as a whole.  I argue that Cardenal's mapping of a dualism between pure enclosure and corrupt agora derives from the conception of the artist in literary modernismo and represents an ingenious alternative form of social criticism that brings together intimate, collective and moral realities.