Nació en Tabasco en 1899, murió en 1977. Si López Velarde y Tablada inician nuestra poesía contemporánea, Carlos Pellicer es el primer poeta realmente moderno que se da en México. No insurge contra el Modernismo: lo incorpora a la vanguardia, toma de esta y otras corrientes aquello útil para decir lo que quiere decir. Cuando muchos de los "Contemporáneos" exploraban los desiertos de la conciencia, Pellicer redescubrió la hermosura del mundo: el sol que arde sobre los ríos vegetales del trópico, el mar que a cada instante llega por vez primera a la playa. Sus palabras quieren reordenar la creación. Y en ese "trópico entrañable" los elementos se concilian: la tierra, el aire, el agua, el fuego le permiten mirar "en carne viva la belleza de Dios". Mágica y en continua metamorfosis, su poesía no es razonamiento ni prédica: es canto. Gran poeta, Pellicer nos enseñó a mirar el mundo con otros ojos y al hacerlo modificó la poesía mexicana. Su obra, toda una poesía con su pluralidad de géneros, se resuelve en una luminosa metáfora, en una interminable alabanza del mundo: Pellicer es el mismo de principio a fin.*
Su producción poética está recopilada en Obras: Poesía (1981), y en Poesía completa (edicion de Luis Mario Schneider y Carlos Pellicer López, 1996). La versión al inglés de "Deseos" aquí publicada procede de New Poetry of Mexico, editada por Mark Strand (y que es una traducción parcial de Poesía en movimiento). Las otras traducciones proceden de Nine Latinamerican Poets, traducido por Rachel Benson (Las Americas Publishing Co., Nueva York, 1968). No se han publicado en inglés más que un puñado de sus poemas en diversas antologías.
Carlos Pellicer was friendly with many of the writers associated with the influential journal Contemporáneos (1928-1931), including Gorostiza, Novo, and Villaurrutia. In his attention to the chromatic light, the sculptural forms, and the dynamic energy of the tropical American landscape, however, from the start of his writing career Pellicer distinguished essential elements of his aesthetic from those of the Contemporáneos group and the Creationists: from their verbalism, from their musical and subjective intensity, and from their interest in the seductiveness of death as an informing poetic myth.
After having been imprisoned for political reasons, during the 1930s, Pellicer traveled, both as an individual and as a cultural attaché, for much of his adult life. In compensation, though, his poems often register the rhythms and visual intensity of his native Tabasco. "I am from the topics," he wrote, "and in the land where I was born… the Mayan culture flourished. Therefore, the ancient cultures of Mexico have had a level of meaning for me which I could call a passion. All this has inclined me more toward nature and to heroes than anything else. Simón Bolívar and Cuauhtémoc have been the personalities whom I have studied most and who have most embellished my modest poetic works." His early poems, as in Colores en el mar (Colors in the Sea, 1921) and Piedra de sacrificios (Stone of Sacrifice, 1924), were often joyous pictorial evocations of tropical landscapes, charged with a sense of the mutability of natural forces (the sea, the moon, the flight of birds). In later works Pellicer tamed that exuberance slightly, to include more historical and spitirual meditations in his profoundly visual style.*
The translations here presented come from Nine Latinamerican Poets, translated by Rachel Benson, Las Americas Publishing Co., New York, 1968, and from Mark Strand's edition of New Poetry of Mexico.