Now if we can believe in the final, evident, irrevocable death of the sonnet. We finally have the physical proof, the legal record of this death: the anti-sonnet. The sonnet that is no longer a sonnet, but its negation, its setback, its criticism, its renunciation. While the avant-garde was content to declare the abolition of the sonnet in cubist, dadaist and expressionist poems, this journey of the new poetry was not yet completely over. Only the overthrow of the sonnet had yet been reached: its execution was yet to come. The sonnet, prisoner of the revolution, spied on the hour of corrupting his guardians; The old poets, with the mask of youth, roamed deceitfully around his prison, lurking for the chance to set him free; the new poets themselves, already tired of the Jacobinism of free verse, began to manifest from time to time a timid nostalgia for their classical and Latin authority. There was the threat of a specious and Napoleonic restoration: Thermidor of the Republic of Letters. Jaime Torres Bodet, in his precious magazine Contemporáneos, recently began a formal attempt to return to the sonnet, thus vindicated in the most torrid headquarters of revolutionary America. Today, fortunately, Martín Adán performs the anti-sonnet. He does it, perhaps, despite himself, moved by his Catholic taste and his Thomistic gift for reconciling the new dogma with the classical order. A captious reactionary purpose. What he gives us, without knowing it, It is not the sonnet but the anti-sonnet. It was not enough to attack the sonnet from outside like the avant-garde: one had to get inside it, like Martín Adán, to eat its entrails until emptying it. Moth work, neat, secret, scholastic. Martín Adán has tried to introduce a Trojan horse into the new poetry; but he has succeeded in introducing it, rather, into the sonnet, whose siege concludes with this maneuver, learned from Ulysses not from Joyce but from Homer. Now rap your knuckles on the sonnet as if it were a Renaissance piece of furniture; it is perfectly hollow; it is pure shell. Baroque, culterano, Gongorino, Martín Adán set out in search of the sonnet, to discover the anti-sonnet, as Columbus found on his voyage to America instead of the Indies. During the time that he has worked as a Benedictine on this work, he has walked around Lima in a somewhat scholastic, almost theological, totally Gongorian overcoat, as if atoning for the schoolboy's prank of having inserted his Sephardic profile and his Semitic, aquiline smile between orthodox faces. The anti-sonnet announces that poetry is already sufficiently defended against the sonnet: in lengthy laboratory tests, Martín Adán has discovered the preventive vaccine. The anti-sonnet is an anti-body. There is only one danger that Martín Adán has ended only with one of the two species of the sonnet: the Alexandrian sonnet. The classic, Tuscan, authentic sonnet is that of Petrarch, the hendecasyllable. For something, Torres Bodet has preferred him in his claim. The Alexandrian is a decadent meter. If our friend has still left the eleven-syllable sonnet alive, the new poetry must remain alert. We must finish off the company of installing pure nonsense on the molds of classical poetry.
* Amauta (No. 17, September 1928) written by JCM regarding the publication of the poems by Martín Adán Spring Itinerary. Translated by Google.