Gonzalo Rojas’ poetic letters

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to approach Gonzalo Rojas’ poetic expression of a genre called poetic letters or epistles in verse. This genre of poetic epistles was written initially by Horace and Ovidius, and continued to be written within the literary tradition of all times to the present. The information of news to friends or relatives, as a channel of communication, finds new forms in a variety of modern messages –message, cable, telegram, fax, memo, e-mail, etc.– which contribute to give form to a new kind of poetic epistles. Among contemporary and current Chilean poets, Gonzalo Rojas (Lebu 1917) has cultivated this genre with an extension, originality and variety that we want to underline in this first approach through the analysis of some of his most important samples.