SOURCE: “A Woman and the World,” in Western Humanities Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1957, pp. 96–8.

In the following essay, Furness analyses central themes in the poems of World of Seven Wells.

In the feminine literature of twentieth-century Spanish America, some authors follow true feminine tradition by writing of subjects which have always had high priority with women, such as love, motherhood, and religion. Others have stepped out of their traditional role, and have written of social, political, and urban problems. To the latter group belongs Alfonsina Storni, who reportedly initiated in Argentina a new school of literature and “who won for herself an enviable and respected position in the maledominated literary circles of her native city, Buenos Aires.” Fated to a sorrowful life and to an incurable malady that only made the struggle seem more hopeless, Storni, at the age of forty-six, sought surcease from it all in “el...