SOURCE: Gibbons, Reginald. “Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (spring 1987): 648–71.

In the following essay, Gibbons critically examines Cardenal's expression of his political views through his poetry.

Perhaps the subject of political poetry is so inextricable from specific poems and poets at particular historical moments that one can discuss only examples. Ernesto Cardenal is an interesting one, not least because the cause for which he long spoke, the release of the Nicaraguan peasantry from the oppressive burdens of economic exploitation and arbitrary rule by force, was victorious; the Sandinista victory gave him an opportunity, or an obligation, to become a poet of praise and victory after he had been a poet of compassion and wrath:

De pronto suena en la noche una sirena de alarma, larga, larga, el aullido lugúbre de la sirena de incendio o de la ambulancia blanca de la muerte...