José María Vergara y su “lectura”de un poeta barroco

Abstract

Jose Maria Vergara (1831-1872) set out to define the specificity of the national literature of Colombia with respect to that of Spain. To establish a “national canon” was actually a political and cultural enterprise undertaken by many nineteenth-century Spanish American intellectuals who saw in it an expression of the formation of the Nation. This article aims to characterize the reading that the aforementioned author did of the works of a seventeenth-century poet from Bogota. First, there is a brief synthesis of the arguments exposed by Vergara about the San Ignacio de Loyola-Poema Heroico (1666) by Hernando Dominguez Camargo (1606-1659); immediately, I expose the meaning with regard to the implications of the reading elaborated by the author, and, finally, I detail the implications that this reading has for the foundation of a literary national tradition.