Abstract:
José Martí was a thoughtful and well-informed reader of books, newspapers and articles that
reflected the intellectual as well as the political pulse of the United States from 1880 to 1895. His
knowledge of U.S. authors and their works affected his life, his political perspectives and his
writing. In the nearly fifteen years that Martí lived in the United States, he liberally absorbed
ideas and concepts from American writers, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman,
but also from proponents of social change such as Helen Hunt Jackson, who championed the
cause of North American Indians. Emerson’s ideas permeate Martí’s work after 1882 and are a
presence in the Cuban’s most popular poetry, Versos Sencillos. Whitman’s verses reinforced
Martí’s deep humanitarian and democratic instincts and confirmed the importance of new poetry
for a new hemisphere. American thinkers exerted a significant influence on the Cuban writer, and
this presentation will offer notable examples.