“Al partir”, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (With a Background of Heredia and Martí)

Abstract

As with any good classic, even if it is only within a national literary tradition, the story of the effects of the poem “Al partir”, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda Arteaga, is still open to writers and scholars. This article proposes to show it in three different ways: the tracking of its foundational condition within the poetry of its female author; a rather immanent rereading of that text; and the reinsertion of the same in the Cuban nineteenth-century poetic tradition concentrated on the figures of the romantic Heredia and the modernist-modern Martí.