SOURCE: “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove,” in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 3-19.

In the following essay, Wallace explores the ways in which Cervantes's poetry in Emplumada emphasizes her belief that human lives are closely defined by race, gender, and class with occasional opportunities to transcend these limitations.

When Emerson, in the 1840s, imagined an ideal American poet, he confessed his difficulties even with the models of Milton and Homer; the one he found “too literary” and the other “too literal and historical” (Whicher 239). As with other of his pronouncements, Emerson leaves this one suggestively unexplained. I take him to mean that his ideal poet will be equally faithful both to what we call art and to what we call history, and that even in great poets, these fidelities are not easily reconciled.…

It was never...