Because the greats unite, I say today, but the road was hard for both heroes who reached us to this day and will prevail beyond their disastrous, volcanic and terrible may, both for them at the time, and for their friends at the time. and in the context of a contemporaneity that vindicates verse as alive as sword and shrapnel.
And the fact is that Heredia and Martí had many threads of contact without intending it, the first from the East, from Santiago par excellence, from “where the palms are highest in Cuba, Heredia was born.” Niagara Singer, representative of the pre-romantic school, owner of the rebellious and elegant verse like the second; became the National Hero of Cuba, from Havana, but in eternal rest in Santiago, his definitive abode, curiously, not frequented, but that he knew of his children, his pains and so epicentric for which he called “the tireless Santiago”.
Heredia marked by May 7, 1839 when he collapsed from tuberculosis, in the Mexican capital, at an age as young as 35 years, overwhelmed by the impact of the famous letter to Miguel Tacón, who granted the poet permission to return to his Cuba to see his mother with difficulty.
The impact was terrible for Heredia because it provoked many comments, mainly among friends, such as the famous Domingo del Monte; Imagine asking the Captain General for permission to return from exile, at the cost of retracting the revolutionary position, that was the catalyst for the comments.
“From this regret of useless greatness, of unoccupied passion and vile life, the poet who no longer found more consolation on earth than the loyalty of a constant friend died, laboriously spinning his last verses.”. I tell you that Martí’s approach in his speech is still very interesting. epideicticbecause it is known from the consensus of the audience, does not seek to convince about who Heredia was, much less when referring to that stormy situation, when in silence and from distant Mexico City, our poet and Niagara Singer entered eternity.
“In its very resonant and free prose, -says Martí de Heredia- That flight of wide wings is continuous, and movement that is both rhythmic and unrestrained”.
Behind and very present are those memories of Heredia, when Martí said: “He heard about Bolívar, that he began to cry when he entered Caracas triumphantly, and he saw that the Caracas women dressed in white, with flower crowns, came out to welcome him.”.
It means that Martí made his praise of Heredia very clear, attached to Cubanness, and he demonstrated it in the speech in New York in 1889, with all the classic rhetoric in the style of Cicero: exordium, narration, argumentation and peroration. And that has been said, about the excellence of Martí’s oratory at Hardman Hall, on November 30.
Permission to you to conclude with Martí’s exordium, the illogical of the logical, but it supports the image of the romantic poet José María Heredia, according to José Martí: “divine Cuban”, “unfading genius”, “unhappy hero”, “genius of the noble Republic” “with the thunder in his right hand, the torrent at his feet, the cloak of storm shaken by the primitive winds of creation, still bathed of the tears of Cuba the face”, granting Heredia a heroic aura.
And it is that «The knees of all the men who bend them weigh heavily on the heart of the honest genius!»
