Two Elegies of Hope: Hurricane Neruda & To Julia with No Tears

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Pedro Mir (1913-2000) is recognized as the Dominican Republic’s foremost literary figure of the twentieth century. In 1982 the Dominican Congress named him National Poet. On the occasion of his death, the president of the Dominican Republic declared three days of national mourning and celebrated the poet’s memory and his work: Don Pedro will always be with us because his thinking was transcendent, and he truly fathomed the national Dominican soul.

Hurricane Neruda won the Annual Poetry Award given by the Secretary of Education of the Dominican Republic, in 1975, the year of the poem’s original publication. This elegy was written in response to the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and the military dictatorship that followed the coup in Chile and the associated death of its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, twelve days before the poet died, possibly murdered.

To Julia with No Tears, written in 1998, is Mir’s last published poem. This elegy celebrates Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) who gave voice to her native island and its struggle for independence. A feminist in word and deed, she also spoke up for Afro-Caribbean writers. She furthered the cultural and socio-political cause of all Caribbean peoples, and for her profound contribution to this cause, she became significant to Mir.