After Mistral established a poetic reputation and received her diploma in 1912, she got a teaching position at a secondary school near Santiago. Eventually, in 1918 she became head of a secondary school for girls in Punta Arenas, which later inspired a series of poems,  Paisajes de Patagonia (Patagonian Landscapes).

Growing up around poverty, she was sympathetic to the plight of the poor, and was eager to help when it came to education. In 1922, she accepted the invitation of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of education, to create educational programs for the poor in Mexico. As part of this effort, she brought mobile libraries into rural areas to make literature accessible to more people.

Mistral rarely took a break, delving into editing her book, Readings for Women, and traveled to other countries to study their teaching methods. All her hard work rightfully earned her the title “Teacher of the Nation” in 1923 by the Chilean government.

Once again, quoting Margot Arce de Vazquez:

“For Mistral, teaching was a calling to which she gave all her enthusiasm, freedom, and a creative spirit that abhorred routine.

A large proportion of her literary work, both prose and poetry, had an educational purpose; it was intended for the classroom and was written with a view to awakening and forming within the child a moral and religious conscience and an aesthetic sensitivity. In the classroom she was a severe taskmaster, exacting hard work and strict discipline.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Desolación (Desolation) 

Desolación was Gabriela’s first collection of poems, published in 1922. It was, in retrospect, a major event in Latin American literature. In Gabriela Mistral: The Poet and Her Work (1964), Margot Arce de Vazquez writes:

“The new voice immediately reveals its originality as it stands out above the chorus of other feminine voices … Passion, strength, the strange mixture of tenderness and harshness, of delicacy and coarseness, give this voice a unique accent. Her words exercise an irresistible fascination on the reader, leaving in the mouth a bitter aftertaste of blood.

After the publication of Desolación, Gabriela’s fame grew rapidly; a legend began to weave itself around her.

Desolación consists of a body of seventy-three poems, grouped under the headings “Vida” (Life), “Escuela” (School), “Infantiles” (Children), “Dolor” (Sorrow), and “Naturaleza” (Nature), a collection of poetic and poematic prose writings and four cradle songs.”

As Mistral rose to fame, she was asked to attend numerous conferences and give speeches. She eventually became Chile’s representative abroad for nearly twenty years, attending the League of Nations, United Nations, and other international bodies.

After much traveling, Mistral decided she would settle down so she became a college professor. She taught classes at Middlebury and Barnard colleges and the University of Puerto Rico.

She became an icon for the Latin community in 1945 when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Latin American of any gender to receive the honor.

Published poetry collections

Gabriela Mistral’s body of work includes six collections of her poetry (four of which were published in her lifetime) in addition to several volumes of letters and prose. As mentioned earlier, her first book, Desolación, was published in 1922 in New York City. It gained her an almost instant audience. This was followed by Ternura (Tenderness), published in 1924 in Spain.

Tala (Felling), published in 1938, is considered her most important book, at least on a par with Desolación. Mistral reissued it in 1947, taking out all the children’s poems.

The last book published in her lifetime was Lagar (Wine Press), published in Chile in 1954. 

The two posthumous collections were Poema de Chile (Poem of Chile), 1967, and Lagar II (Wine Press II), 1991,  both published in Santiago, Chile.

Mistral also wrote copious amounts of prose pieces, though few were collected for publication. 

Themes in Gabriela Mistral’s poetry

Many of Mistral’s poems are written with intense emotion and direct language influenced by the modernist movement. Reoccurring themes include love, deceit, sorrow, nature, travel, and love for children.

Some of the themes carried through her work were those she explored from the time of her first collection, Desolación, which included, according to  Arce de Vazquez:

” … The ideal teacher, the artist and artistic creation, motherhood and children, living beings and materials, the ecstasy of love, the passion of Christ, death, beauty, and the eternal.”

All of these emotions create a constant internal battle that she can only express it through poetry. Her lyrical voices represent various aspects of her own personality that readers can interpret as autobiographical voices of a woman who has been hurt and betrayed numerous times. Read a selection of her poems in both English and Spanish.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Poetry of Gabriela Mistral: A Brief Overview and Analysis