SOURCE: Miller, Beth, and Alan Devermond. “The Metamorphosis of Avellaneda's Sonnet to Washington.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literature 33, no. 2 (summer 1979): 153-70.

In the following essay, Miller and Devermond trace Avellaneda's revision of her sonnet, “A Washington,” as evidence of Avellaneda's evolving political views and self-identification as a Spanish-American writer.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda published a sonnet to George Washington in the first edition of her Poesías (1841).¹ It was reprinted in the second edition (1850), and again in a Spanish-language journal in New York in 1852, in both cases without any alteration other than a minor change in punctuation.² The first volume of Avellaneda's collected works (1869) contains what seems at first glance to be the same poem.³ Even the most cursory second glance reveals substantial differences, but their extent has not yet been examined or explained, as far as we know.

The stylistic differences cannot be...