Except for [Cardenal's] earliest verses which were modeled on Ruben Dario and Neruda, Whitman and Pound are his principal forbears. As with Whitman, there is less compression than extension in Cardenal's most successful poems. The effects usually depend on increment to uncover depth; and the poem is meant to be public, an open window bearing the naked heart. From Pound (whom he translated, and whose influence he has acknowledged), Cardenal derived his method of incorporating disparate matter into a patchwork fabric while avoiding slack. And from Pound he learned to vitalize the rhetorical flourish with lean precise imagery.

Cardenal's moral nature (to revive the useful nineteenth century phrase) more closely resembles Whitman's. He is, after all, a Roman Catholic priest in the tradition of the pre-patristic visionaries. And throughout his writings he refers often and hopefully to the uniting of communism and Christianity, a unity he glimpses in...