ABSTRACT
Cuban poet Jose Marti introduced Whitman to Latin America in his mythologized piece “The Poet Walt Whitman” in 1887, most poets from that region certainly knew of the man and his legend, if not his poetry in the original. A life-long champion for the United States (US), calling this country “the greatest poem,” Whitman was not without his flaws; he opposed neither slavery nor Manifest Destiny. In so far as the US wielded colonial power and violence over Mexico, even and especially during Whitman’s lifetime, there is clear evidence that the US poet, at least during certain intervals, endorsed such foreign policy. Much can be said about the extent to which US poetry influenced South American and Caribbean poets. By the time Langston Hughes’s poem “Song for Spain” was published, the African American poet had already spent considerable time in parts of Latin America.
