SOURCE: “Gabriela Mistral,” in Modern Women Poets of Spanish America, Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1945, pp. 171–203.

In the following essay, Rosenbaum examines the appearance and development of such characteristic themes as passion, violence, asceticism, materialism, and pan-Americanism in Mistral's poetry.

The year that so tragically cut short the career of Delmira Agustini—1914—was to introduce to the Spanish American world of letters another poetess of first rank: the Chilean, Gabriela Mistral. Her best known poems, sprung, most of them, from a common fount of pain (the death, by suicide, of her lover), of Desolation—as her first book is called—are simpler in form than the tortuous ones of Delmira. But they disclose cavernous depths, and their intensity sounds the very pith of human emotion, especially in those where—as in the somber ones that tell of the lover's self-inflicted death—she speaks of “the ineffable” with...