Fountain, Anne2019-09-102019-09-102019-06-27http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11868/795https://youtu.be/PRlYCKcShF8Please click on YouTube Video link above to stream the presentation.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.en-USMartí, José, 1853-1895American literatureEmerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892Video