Nicanor Parra's Poem 'The Anti-Lazarus'

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Nicanor Parra is the son of a school teacher, born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile. He comes from a family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. In 1933 I enrolled in the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile and qualified as a professor of mathematics and physics in 1938. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 I enrolled at Brown University in the United States to study physics and then In 1948 he attended Oxford University to study cosmology. In 1946 I returned to Chile as a professor at the University of Chile. Parra is a Chilean poet, mathematician and physicist and is one of the most important Latin American poets of his time. He describes himself as an "anti-poet" because of his dislike of pomp and standard poetic function. It has been proposed on four different occasions for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Parra demonstrates in his poems the freedom of experimentation and an irreverence towards traditional poetic values. His style of poetic writing combines pun, humor, vernacular and elements of literary tradition and popular culture, human nature and society. In each of his poems, he chooses to avoid …show more content…

It consists of forty-seven lines of free verse divided non-systematically into eleven stanzas. The title is a composite word that encloses both the Western cultural heritage and the innovative artistic ideals of Parra. He points out that the biblical figure of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha who rose from the dead by command of Jesus. In this sense, it refers to the miracle of the resurrection, which is one of the most important miracles within the Christian tradition. On the other hand, the use of the prefix "anti" refers to the concept of anti-poem, implying a conscious attempt to break with traditional lyrical forms and making Parra's most significant contribution to contemporary

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