Literary critics agree that in few places has poetry played as prominent a role as in Central America. After examining the area's poetry as a whole, Alfonso Chase, Marc Zimmerman, and John Beverley have defended the existence of common elements among these countries' diverse problems--the proliferation of military dictatorships throughout much of the twentieth century being one of the most significant--that have affected the overall social and geographic area. These critics have consequently proposed the existence of a region-wide literary and cultural language by which many Central American poets have portrayed and articulated their sociohistorical reality. The emergence of this system of literary and cultural production can be traced back to the cosmopolitan Modernismo of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, but Zimmerman, in Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from el Señor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchú (1995), dates its...