Background
Emilio Ballagas y Cubeñas was born on November 7, 1908, in Camaguey, Cuba.
Emilio Ballagas y Cubeñas was born on November 7, 1908, in Camaguey, Cuba.
As a young man, Ballagas won a literary competition sponsored by the periodical Revista Martiniana. The prize for winning was a scholarship to study in Havana.
Ballagas completed a second Ph.D. in 1946, and published his dissertation, "Situación de la poesía afroamericana," in the Revista Cubana and the anthology Maps de la poesía negra americana.
Emilio Ballagas began to write poetry and short stories as a teenager. His first poem was published in 1926, when he was seventeen years old. During his studies at the University of Havana, the young Ballagas established himself as a poet. At the end of 1930, the literary periodical Revista de Avarice published his poem “Elegia de Maria Belen Chacon.” The 1931, publication of the poetry collection Jubilo y fuga reinforced his reputation as a leading Cuban poet.
Ballagas continued to write while completing his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of black Hispanics. His interest in his dissertation topic spurred him to edit Cuaderno de poesia negra and Antologia de la poesia negra hispanoamericana.
His early poems of the 1920s are logical, ordered, postmodernist verses. As postmodernism went out of vogue later that decade, avant garde poetry, with its contempt for rules, became more popular. Some of Ballagas’s work published in the 1930s shows the influence of the avant garde movement.
By the early 1930s avant garde poetry had fallen out of favor in Cuba, and Ballagas helped popularize a new literary movement, “posvanguardismo” (post-avant garde).
Ballagas completed his Ph.D. in pedagogy in 1933 and taught at the Normal School for teachers in Santa Clara, becoming its director the following year.
In 1939, he published Sabor eterno, a collection of poems about love, written with the intense emotions that characterized the second stage of his poetry. He traveled to New York and became associated with the Institute for the Education of the Blind.
Ballagas died in 1954, of cardiovascular illness.
Ballagas was poetically inspired by Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and by metaphysics.
Ballagas may have been artistically inspired by a 1937 visit to Paris, France. There he rubbed elbows with such notable literary figures as Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda, two writers who would later win the Nobel Prize.
Ballagas’s later poetry is introspective and melancholic.
Ballagas was a member of the Colegio de Doctores en Letras y Filosofía, Colegio Nacional de Pedagogos, Colegio Nacional de Periodistas, and P.E.N. Club.
Ballagas married Antonia Lopez y Villaverde, in 1947. They had one child, Manuel Francesco.