SOURCE: “Gabriela Mistral's Poema de Chile,” in The Americas, Vol. XVII, No. 3, January, 1961, pp. 261–76.

In the following essay, Bates retraces the poetic journey through Chile Mistral undertook in her unfinished Poema de Chile.

The distinguished Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, died in Hempstead, Long Island, on January 10, 1957, of cancer. In the numerous articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines after her death the factual mistakes about her life and writings were endless. Although her critics have not been careful to separate myths from facts, most of these errors can be corrected by referring to books or articles about her—but not the mistakes about her as yet unpublished Poema de Chile. For this reason I have assembled these notes about the Poema de Chile taken from conversations with Gabriela during the last four years of her life which she spent for...