These women do not, as a rule, and despite some too broad assumptions in South America as to the exclusively materialistic spirit of the United States, enjoy the advantages of culture that are possessed by our lady poets. There is no Amy Lowell among them to revel in the smashing of canons and amuse herself with the erection of new ones for others to smash. There is no atmosphere of Bohemianism and night life in metropolitan cafés. Facile analogies might be drawn, but not too much faith should be placed in them. Thus Maria Enriqueta would suggest Sara Teasdale; Alfonsina Storni would similarly suggest Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is indubitably her superior. Over them all, except in the rare and welcome moments of spiritual rebellion, hovers an air of domesticity, as if, upon venturing into the half-forbidden precincts of art,--which means perfect expression and therefore is “unwomanly,”--they carried with them something of that narrower home and hearth which only now they are abandoning. “It is not easy,” wrote Verissimo upon the consideration of a volume of poetry by Sra. D. Julia Cortines, “to speak freely of women as authors, since, however much as writers they detach themselves from their sex, the most elementary gallantry requires us to treat them solely as women. I, who am very far from being a feminist (which is perhaps not quite consistent with my social opinions), do not deny absolutely the intellectual capacities of womankind, and, with the same impartiality (at least, so I presume) I cannot discover in them any exceptional qualities of heart or mind.… It may have been for this reason that the Muse, who is a woman, never deigned to endow me with her favors and denied me the gifts of poesy.… Happily, Brazilian poetesses are few in number; unhappily, they are not good poets. Almost all, past and present, are mediocre. There has been none up to this time who might dispute a place with the half dozen of our best poets of the other sex. I could never understand, or I understand it in a manner that could hardly brook explanation, since woman according to current opinion is far richer in matters of feeling than man, she has never given anything really notable or extraordinary in art, which is chiefly feeling.… One of the forces of art is sincerity, and woman, either because her own psychological organism forbids it, or because the social organization that limits her expansion has never consented to it, has never been able to be sincere without endangering her privileges or even declassifying herself.” Love, he continues, being the chief of lyric themes, and woman prevented by social custom from really expressing herself, the virtual silence of woman in art is inevitable.[2]