Mariátegui: Reader of Poetry

This article studies Mariátegui as a reader of poetry, that is, as a critic who found in poetry an object of questioning and a place to demonstrate the political fertility of the imagination. Mariátegui proposed three categories to map the different aesthetics tendencies occurring during the first decades of the twentieth century: “pure lyricism”, “absolute nonsense” and “revolutionary epic”. The aim of this article is to comment on each of them within the framework of a theoretical option that understands poetry as a device to broaden the concept of reality and to acquire, from there, a more complex understanding of the social world and the functioning of subjectivity.