Rising from Her Verses

In a preview from LARB Quarterly no. 44, “Pressure,” Sophia Stewart explores the poetry and politics of Julia de Burgos.

By Sophia StewartMay 11, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

• Biography & Autobiography

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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WHEN SHE WAS 23, Julia de Burgos renamed herself. It was 1937, and the Puerto Rican poet had just divorced her first husband, scandalizing her conservative compatriots. She didn’t stop there. Newly single, she opted not only to revert to her maiden name, Burgos, but also to alter it slightly, inserting “de” in front—which, in Spanish, denotes marital status or possession. With this, she declared that she was and forever would be under new ownership: her own.

Burgos had until then signed her poems Julia Burgos or, adopting her husband’s last name, Julia Burgos de Rodríguez. Adding “de” to her own surname was, as writer Jack Agüeros notes, a move that “technically makes no sense in the Spanish form.” The young poet’s new name was as much an artistic statement as a social provocation: Burgos had not merely reinvented herself; “with one stroke of her pen,” Agüeros writes, she had “put herself in the avante-garde.”

As if to commemorate her renaming, Burgos wrote a poem to herself. “A Julia de Burgos” describes Du Boisian double consciousness, an ineradicable split between the Julia that the world demands and the one the poet knows herself to be. She writes to that other, public face:

The voice that rises from my verses is not yours: it is mine
because you are the apparel and I am the essence;
and the most profound abyss lies between the two of us.

At the crux of her self-inquiry is a conflict of authenticity. The other Julia is a “frigid doll of social mendacity,” politely acquiescing to the demands of decorum and concerned with appearances; the real Julia is a “virile flash of human truth” who refuses to placate anyone and scorns el qué dirán, which translates roughly to “what they might say”—a distinctly Latin American form of social policing. Above all, Julia in her true form is fully independent—a sentiment Burgos believed applied as much to her homeland as to herself. “You belong to your husband, your master; not me,” she scoffs at her alter ego. “I belong to no one.”

The assertive self-knowledge and rejection of bourgeois femininity in “A Julia de Burgos” was utterly radical in 1938, when it appeared in Burgos’s debut collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows). Burgos approached every aspect of her life—literature, activism, sex—with a similarly radical ethos. She never compromised. Love or work, poetry or politics—for her, these pursuits were one and the same.

Yet, as “A Julia de Burgos” suggests, Burgos was also a divided woman, defined by contradiction. She was fiercely self-sufficient yet drawn to all-consuming romances; she loved Puerto Rico yet resented its conservatism; her tremendous ambition was rivaled only by her self-destructive streak. Less than 15 years after the publication of “A Julia de Burgos,” she was dead.

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Burgos was born on the morning of February 17, 1914. The eldest of 13 children, she grew up in the rural barrio of Santa Cruz, located on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico near San Juan. Her parents were jíbaros, subsistence farmers living in the countryside. Poverty loomed large throughout her childhood; half of her siblings succumbed to malnutrition and illness. Storytelling was a kind of salvation: her father would often recite passages from Don Quixote to young Julia, and her mother, during their trips to the local pond to wash laundry, would relate tales of the naiads that lived in the surrounding water.

Academically, Burgos excelled. Working-class women rarely went to high school, let alone college, but Burgos skipped several grades in high school and went to college on a scholarship. At 19, she graduated with an education degree from the University of Puerto Rico. Her career as an elementary school teacher was cut short in 1934, the year she married her first husband, the journalist Ruben Rodriguez Beauchamp—and, more importantly, published her first poem.

“Glory to You,” which appeared in the magazine Alma Latina, was dedicated to the protester Manuel Rafael Suárez Diaz. Diaz had been killed two years earlier, during a demonstration by Puerto Rican Nationalists against the adoption of the new one-star flag. Shortly after his death, The New York Times reported that Diaz had become known as “a martyr and as the first patriot of this generation to die for island freedom.” Burgos herself was an active and ardent member of the Nationalist Party, founded in 1922 with the goal of securing Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. A small but vocal political faction, the Nationalists gained momentum in the 1930s under party president Pedro Albizu Campos (to whom Burgos also dedicated a poem), resulting in several bloody confrontations with police.

“[Your] immaculate offering has lit the fuse / that will start the bonfire of revolution,” she writes to Diaz in “Glory to You,” a Spanish-style sonnet. Many of her early poems were explicitly political, often appearing in Nationalist newspapers. Perhaps the most rousing of these, “The Time Is Ours” (1936), is addressed to the “noble farmer,” whose “disgrace has only one response”: revolution. “The imperialism of the United States / has dug a wide grave,” Burgos writes, one large enough to fit the farmer and his child, his livestock and his land. She summons the galvanizing rhetoric of a great orator:

Traitors and Judas,
tremble!
Because the time is ours,
victory is ours,
the Republic is ours,
its greatness is ours.

Poetry formed just one part of Burgos’s political activism: off the page, she was on the ground. By the time she was 22, Burgos had been elected secretary general of the party’s women’s wing, the Daughters of Freedom; she regularly attended Nationalist rallies and wrote in support of the cause for the San Juan newspaper El Mundo. All of this came naturally to Burgos, who had grown up in the shadow of American imperialism. The year she was born, Puerto Rico’s national congress, operating under US jurisdiction, unanimously voted for independence; Washington ignored the vote and, three years later, imposed citizenship on Puerto Ricans (a move that conveniently allowed the government to conscript the island’s men into the army when the United States entered World War I the following year). When Burgos was 14, the worst hurricane in Puerto Rican history—dethroned only by Maria some 89 years later—decimated its infrastructure and economy, and federal aid to the island’s now-citizens proved meager and sluggish.

Then there was Puerto Rico’s own racial politics. The brown-skinned Burgos was of German, Spanish, and African descent—an inheritance that placed her near the bottom of Puerto Rico’s racial hierarchy and ensnared her in its legacy of colonialism, racism, and diaspora. She spent the rest of her life trying to confront that legacy. From an early age, Burgos understood that she had been consigned to the margins of Puerto Rican society on the basis of her class, race, and gender and, on the world stage, consigned to the margins of history by the US government’s incursions into Puerto Rico. But living on the periphery was, in its own way, liberating: if she was effectively invisible, if nothing she did would ever measure up, then she could do whatever she wanted. And she did.

Burgos spurned Puerto Rico’s conservative Catholic culture by leaving her husband in 1937, and rattled its literati with the self-publication of her debut poetry collection the following year. She began reading Nietzsche, Kant, and Stefan Zweig; modernists like Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini, and José Santos Chocano; and the great vanguardista César Vallejo. She went on to take a high-profile lover, the exiled Dominican dissident and intellectual Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón. Their romance was star-crossed from the start, and the subject of much vitriol given Grullón’s elevated social status (he was the grandson of a former Dominican president; his parents vocally disapproved of the union). Nevertheless, Burgos considered Grullón the love of her life, and most of the poems in her second collection, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth, 1939), were written for him. A part of Burgos craved male validation, even at the expense of her identity: “I wanted to be like men wanted me to be,” she writes in the opening line of “I Was My Own Path.”

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With the publication of Poema en veinte surcos, Burgos’s profile rose swiftly. Her formal versatility especially impressed critics: her work spanned lyrical poems, political poems, commemorations and denunciations, sonnets and epics, odes and polemics. She was praised in periodicals, and compared to Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, Argentina’s Alfonsina Storni, and Uruguay’s Juana de Ibarbourou. Her hero, Pablo Neruda, liked her poems so much that he promised to write an introduction for her next collection, though Burgos died before it came to fruition. (Former Dominican president Juan Bosch once recalled Neruda saying that Burgos “had been called to be a great poet of America.”) She read at tertulias, or literary salons; rubbed elbows with other politically radical poets; and immersed herself in the life of the mind.

Her poem “Río Grande de Loíza,” a bittersweet, sensual portrait of Puerto Rico’s largest river, soon became popular throughout Latin America—thanks, in part, to the Argentine performer Berta Singerman, who incorporated it into her touring one-woman show. The poem’s narrator recalls admiring the river as a child, growing alongside it, and finding inspiration in this “blue mirror, piece of blue fallen from the sky.” The final stanza juxtaposes the island’s natural beauty with its violent history:

Río Grande de Loíza! … Great river. Great torrent of tears.
The greatest of all our island’s tears,
save for the greater ones that come
from the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.

The work remains one of Burgos’s most well known. “[T]here is no anthology of Puerto Rican poetry that does not include ‘Río Grande de Loíza,’” writes Agüeros, who compiled and translated the 1996 collection The Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, which includes an indispensable biographical sketch of the poet.

Young, beautiful, and larger than life, Burgos became, as far as poets go, something of a minor celebrity. Still, she ruffled feathers—and she was not as impervious to el qué dirán as the persona in “A Julia de Burgos.” In the poem’s first line, “people whisper” about Burgos, but she reminds herself, like a mantra: “They lie, Julia de Burgos / They lie, Julia de Burgos.” In reality, the judgments of her compatriots weighed heavily on her. In a letter from Burgos to her sister—part of a trove of correspondence collected and translated by scholar Vanessa Pérez-Rosario in the essential Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014)—an aggrieved Burgos bemoans the “bitter mental attitudes” and “countless enemies on all fronts” that she faced in Puerto Rico.

Many critics disapproved of Burgos’s subject matter. She deployed feminist rhetoric, demanded racial justice, and, as Pérez-Rosario notes, wrote brazenly about Blackness as a distinct political identity. Pérez-Rosario goes on to observe that, while most writers of Burgos’s generation were none too happy to acknowledge the influence of Blackness on Puerto Rican culture, a number of Burgos’s poems constituted a “deliberate reclaiming of the African presence on the island as an autochthonous tradition.” In “Ay, Ay, Ay of the Kinky-Haired Negress,” the narrator, the granddaughter of an enslaved man, extols her African lineage from her hair to her lips to her nose. She is proud to be “pure black.” But the “sins” against her grandfather loom large in her imagination: “[I]f to be a slave is to have no rights, / then to be a master is to have no conscience.” Even the widely beloved “Río Grande de Loíza” subtly invokes Puerto Rico’s legacy of slavery and slaughter—critiques that, in a culture of fierce patriotism and rigid racial hierarchy, were not exactly welcome.

Still, most of Burgos’s detractors were more concerned with her personal life than her poetry. Pérez-Rosario notes that, as a Brown woman from society’s lowest echelons, a different set of rules applied to Burgos, and her “assertiveness, outspokenness, divorce, affair, and bohemian lifestyle resulted in substantial gossip and prejudice on the island.” And while local intellectual circles, comprised mostly of white elites, celebrated her as a writer, they could not accept her as a woman.

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No one seems to agree why Burgos left Puerto Rico for New York on January 13, 1940. Some scholars say it was for work, others to follow Grullón, who had moved there the previous November. Surely, being rebuffed by so many in her homeland was part of it. Meanwhile, Puerto Rican politics had turned away from the Nationalist movement in response to disappointing elections as well as repression and intimidation from the government and police. As a result, many of the island’s writers and artists immigrated to New York to evade persecution and to capitalize on the city’s opportunities.

The poet was torn between her love for Puerto Rico and what it could, in reality, offer her. “I want to become the size / of God / to create a world / anew,” she wrote in “Tardy, Without Wounds.” The island was simply not big enough to contain those aspirations. Her party weakened, her lover elsewhere—Burgos had little reason to stay. New York, on the other hand, was pure possibility. “I want to be universal,” she wrote to her sister, Consuelo, when she arrived. The poet never returned.

New York was hard on Burgos, as it is on so many newcomers. She braved snow and sleet, going door-to-door collecting census data to make ends meet, and slept on a cot in the hallway of a friend’s apartment. Throughout, she remained indefatigable. “Every day opens new horizons and every step is a marvel of new sensations,” she wrote Consuelo. She seized every opportunity to advance her career and hone her craft: she read her poetry at recitals in Harlem and the Bronx, met local artists and intellectuals such as Emelí Vélez de Vando and Pura Belpré, and soaked up as much culture and inspiration as she could.

After several months in New York, Burgos decided to follow Grullón to Cuba. There she led the bohemian literary life she’d always dreamed of, rubbing shoulders with idols and intellectuals including Neruda, Nicolas Guillén, and Juan Bosch. She found herself accepted by the Latin American literati as she had never been in Puerto Rico. She read all day and night, and studied philosophy at the University of Havana. “Although you won’t believe it, I’m in Cuba, the beautiful land of [the poet and revolutionary José] Martí,” she wrote to Consuelo, adding, “I owe everything to Juan, my eternal beloved. I knew that in following him, I would be following my innermost ambitions, and as you can see, they are becoming a reality.”

That reality ruptured only two years later when she and Grullón separated. Burgos’s subsequent return to New York marked the beginning of the end; few poems came. She tried to sustain the momentum she’d achieved in Cuba, writing regularly for the Spanish-language paper Pueblos Hispanos. Her essays and reportage criticized the failure of the United States to make good on the American dream. Her writing gained traction within New York’s Puerto Rican community, laying the groundwork for the Nuyoricans—a movement of Puerto Rican artists based in the city who explored the same issues Burgos did in her work, and which emerged shortly after her death.

There was a brief and unremarkable second marriage to the musician Armando Marín from 1943 to 1947; following its dissolution, Burgos’s drinking worsened and her health declined. She grew frailer, poorer, and more isolated, and spent many of her final years in and out of the hospital. Family and friends back in Puerto Rico begged her to come home, but according to Agüeros, Burgos was at that point “financially unable, and perhaps emotionally unwilling, to return.” From her hospital bed, she penned two final poems, both in English, reflecting on the loneliness that came with self-imposed exile (something many of the Nuyorican poets also later explored). In “Farewell in Welfare Island,” she senses that death is near and mourns the life she had imagined she would have in New York:

Life was somewhere forgotten
and sought refuge in depths of tears
and sorrows;
over this vast empire of solitude
and darkness.

The elusive and undignified circumstances surrounding Burgos’s death often overshadow her achievements. (Another contradiction: that a woman so full of life became strongly identified with her death.) The details land with a thud: Burgos was discovered on July 5, 1953, by two New York City police officers, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. She died early the next morning in the hospital, at 39 years old. The official cause of death was pneumonia, aggravated by cirrhosis of the liver, a consequence of her lifelong alcoholism. She had no identification on her. No one had reported her missing; no one went to claim her body. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island. It took two months for her loved ones to exhume and repatriate her body.

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Burgos was a woman out of time: a pioneer, a force, a towering presence. Her physical stature, in fact, commanded attention—many remember her imposing height, and one urban legend holds that undertakers had to amputate her legs at the knee to fit her body into the city’s standard coffin. The image is crude but apt: Burgos could not be put in a box. Her era was ill-equipped to contain her personal and political desires. She called out misogynoir before the concept had a name, demanding racial justice and critiquing colorism decades before the Civil Rights Movement took root in the United States. Still, in recent years, as her writing has only become more salient, her work has been rediscovered, her legacy secured. Her poetry was revived amid the Civil Rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s; alongside poems by Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Edgar Allan Poe, and Langston Hughes, “A Julia de Burgos” was set to music in Leonard Bernstein’s Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems, which he composed for the 1976 US Bicentennial.

The poet’s visions of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican identity have proven particularly prescient, evidenced by the vibrancy of today’s Puerto Rican diaspora and independence movement. In East Harlem, a glass mosaic of the Nuyorican foremother, created by local artist Manny Vega, watches over the neighborhood, which is also home to the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, and in her hometown of Carolina, a bust of Burgos by Puerto Rican sculptor Tomás Batista anchors the idyllic Parque de Julia de Burgos. And as for Burgos’s Nationalist cause, a 2024 referendum on the island’s political status (the seventh held since 1967) saw a significant uptick in support for sovereignty, though the preference for statehood once again won out. One can only imagine what Burgos might have written in Pueblos Hispanos about these shifting political sands.

“I gamble it all to be exactly who I am,” the poet writes in “A Julia de Burgos.” The odds were stacked against Burgos from the start. Yet, in being so stubbornly “ruled by [her] heart,” she uncovered something essential about the value of handing oneself over to desire and to hope—something that could only be appreciated in the decades after her death. Perhaps she sensed this herself. The poem’s final image is of Burgos—the true Burgos—standing in the middle of a disordered throng, “torch in hand,” lighting the way.

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Poetry translations courtesy of the author; correspondence translations courtesy of Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.