STORNI, ALFONSINA

born May 29, 1892, Sala Capriasca, Switz. died Oct. 25, 1938, Mar del Plata, Arg. poetess who became one of the foremost poets in South American literature. Forced to earn her living at an early age, she joined a theatrical troupe and later taught school in the rural areas of Argentina. She went to Buenos Aires in 1913, where she continued to teach school and worked with a young people's theatre group. Her first book, La inquietud del rosal (1916; The Inquietude of the Rosebush), brought her recognition from the literary circles in Buenos Aires; but it was her volume El dulce dao (1918; The Sweet Injury) that won her popular success. Although she hated men, Storni felt a strong need for love, and she was able to express the tension and passion of these ambivalent feelings in poetry both simple and deeply sensual, expressing an original note in erotic poetry in a sensitive manner. She lost much of this sensitivity in her later work, El mundo de siete pozos (1934; The World of Seven Wells) and Mascarilla y trbol (1938; Mask and Trefoil), as despair drove her to an involved and tortured intellectual poetry, more highly stylized but lacking the simplicity and passion of her early work. Knowing that she was incurably ill, she committed suicide in 1938.