Like Wyatt, Pope, having distanced himself from the powerful evils of his time, begins the process of building and embracing. Unlike Wyatt, however, his solution is not only personal but an attempt to create a universal truth, an archetypal center. He does this by opposing a theophrastic villain against Arbuthnot who becomes the model for the good life. The villain is called Sporus:

The linking of the idea of false speech in everyday life and the Eden story suggests how dangerous and unethical Pope feels the empty and florid writers of his day have become. It is important to remember that Pope’s couplets set up a dialectical relationship of opposites: the second half of a couplet often brings a surprise or a qualification, or an opposition, and in some cases the second half of a line performs this task. In other words, the couplet pairs opposites to compare and contrast: thus the form of the whole poem behaves somewhat like a couplet. In fact, the portrait of Sporus allows Pope to move to his opposite, Arbuthnot, the moral individual who has shunned the evils of the London social and literary scene: “Un-learn’d, he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art, / No Language, but the Language of the Heart.” Pope then extends this care for Arbuthnot first to the small center of his own family, then to a political and cosmic dimension, though still centering himself at the same peripheral position of detachment from the political and poetic world:

It is worthy a note that the political dimension enters the margin here only as a simile, a comparison from the periphery to the center, that the end of the poem becomes a prayer, as we have seen in William Wordsworth, and that the expanding center is one of the imagination — an idyllic hope.

The Cuban poet, Herbert Padilla, describes this process in “Cuban Poets Do Not Sleep Anymore,”^[6] where poets first attempt to turn away from the world, enter their own imaginative nests, but finally are forced to “turn round” towards society’s center:

The key for Padilla is that the poet on the periphery, while not really entering society yet cannot remain simply “alone,” for, literally overwhelmed by the world’s horrors, they must be accurate witnesses to the injustices and wars of our day, “must look and look and look.” The marginalized poet as witness is a role that is adapted by a number of poets such as Claribel Alegría, a Salvadoran poet born in Nicaragua living on the margins of a world created by the oppressive government in Salvador and by American intervention in the entire area.

For her, even meeting a woman described in the poem, “Bus Stop,” as disenfranchised as she herself is, is an occasion to expand her own center through a series of accurate observations until she can exclaim at the end of the poem: “I’ll take your smile with me / the love in your eyes / that redeems me.”

A poet like Irina Ratushinskaya, jailed for several years in the Soviet Union, not only witnesses the evils around her but tries to find at the periphery some moment of beauty, however fleeting. In “I Will Live and Survive,” written in 1983 in a labor camp hospital, she describes how she was beaten, and frozen, as well as the tortures, the feeble attempts at cheering jokes, the utter isolation, the betrayals. Yet one image stands out:^[7]

A more tragic witness is the great Spanish poet, Miguel Hernández. A self-educated shepherd from a small town in eastern Spain, his poems are filled with unexpected images, sudden turns, violent shifts in tone, layers of context, poems that refuse, by their very nature, any static emotional center. At the same time the poems, especially those from the Spanish Civil War, are driving and relentless. Born in 1910, he died only 32 years later, after having been arrested by Franco’s “Civil Guard,” the same thugs who killed another poet of the periphery for his politics and sexual orientation, Federico García Lorca. As a further measure of Hernández’ estrangement, his wife’s father was a member of that guard that arrested him; he spent the last three years of his life in jail where he finally died of tuberculosis. His “Opening Poem”^[8] suggests how he feels the world as a whole, even nature, has ostracized mankind:

Cut off from the natural world around him, the pastoral world he knew as a boy now savaged by war and injustice, the poet at first becomes part of it, becomes metamorphically an animal:

This oxymoronic vision of pain in love recalls Keats somewhat, and indeed his poems are filled with images of thrashing black wings, thorns, anvils, stalactites, icy archangels, thorns, a womb-like, a drum and the like. So far has the world been disrupted, so far has the poet been shoved to the periphery, that he must gather all the threatening images and reorder them in an unending attempt to start over. He says in an article on Neruda:^[9]

I am sick of so much pure and minor art. I like the disordered and chaotic confusion of the Bible, where I see spectacular events, disasters, misfortunes, worlds turned over, and I hear outcries and explosions of blood. I don’t care for the tiny voice that goes into an ecstasy at the sight of a poplar, that fires off four little lines and thinks that now everything has been accomplished in poetry.

For Hernández, then, the role of the poet, recalls the drastic remaking of poetry achieved by the surrealists, and by the unpredictable and wild poetry César Vallejo, exiled from his native Peru, wandering Europe.