Darío, Borges, Neruda and the Ancient Quarrel between Poets and Philosophers

There is a paradox of in teaching subversive literature: university teachers are funded by society and impose on Dionysiac trances a culture of examinations and a comforting rationality. From within the safe institutional framework of the university, we constantly implement Plato's expulsion of the poets from the public arena because they arouse and confuse our minds. This analysis will explore this Nietzschean conflict in three Spanish American poets and simultaneously outline and defend the excessive way poets read other texts as they re-enact this 'ancient' quarrel between poetry and philosophy, in terms of the imperative, or social burden, of having to be responsibly 'Latin American'.