Teresa Wilms Montt - In the Stillness of Marble

On September 8, 1893 Chilean writer, modernist poet  and anarcha feminist poet Teresa Wilms Montt is born in Viña del Mar, Chile, the second of six daughters of Federico Guillermo Wilms Montt y Brieba and Luz Victoria Montt y Montt, both of whose families were members of the commercial and political elite of Chile during early first years of the 20th century, Teresa Wilms' education was at the hands of a strict governesses, who trained her in all the subjects and duties necessary for a search for a suitable husband.
However, since early childhood, she rebelled against the values and teachings of her class, which did not accommodate her free and creative spirit. A talented pianist, singer and writer of lyrics, skills that she was drawn upon the exhibit at the endless round of social gatherings of her class, it was at one of those events, held in the family mansion in the summer of 1910, where she met the young Gustavo Balmaceda Valdés – a family member of the late president José Manuel Balmaceda, who was  eight years older than her and worked for the internal revenue service.
 Despite opposition from both families – Teresa being only seventeen years old and her parents had refused her permission to wed – she married Gustavo Balmaceda, later giving birth to two daughters. However, her free spirit and intellectual pursuits, which brought her into contact with other men, provoked Balmaceda's jealousy, marital tensions and ultimately its breakdown. Balmaceda's work also took the family to far-flung parts of Chile such as Valdivia and Iquique from 1912 to 1915, and led to periods of prolonged loneliness for Teresa that nevertheless proved very fruitful for her creatively.
 It was during these years she turned to the writing of  intimate diaries and sustained close friendships with a number influential artists and intellectuals, such as the poet Victor Domingo Silva. It was during her stay in Iquique that she was published for the first time under the pseudonym 'Tebac', and it was there that she first encounter feminist and anarchist ideas, inspired by the speech of the Spanish feminist Belén de Zárraga and the Chilean Luis Emilio Recabarren, and her meeting with anarchists and syndicalists.
The discovery in 1915 of her affair with Balmaceda's cousin, Vicente Zañartu Balmaceda, led to the men of the Balmaceda Valdés family deciding to have her confined to the Convento de la Preciosa Sangre which was more of an asylym / prison . There, she continued to keep her diary and, depressed, made her first suicide attempt on March 29, 1916. In June 1916, the Chilean poet and anarchist Vicente Huidobro helped her escape from the convent and together they fled to Buenos Aires where she found freedom, both as a woman and as a writer. She began collaborating on the magazine 'Nosotros' (We) along side the like of fellow poets Gabriela Mistral and Ángel Cruchaga Santa María and joined the circle around writers such as Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Borges, and the feminist-fashionista 'Pele' Pelegrina Pastorino. In 1917 Wilms Montt published her first two books – 'Inquietudes Sentimentales' (Sentimental Concerns), a set of fifty poems that enjoyed overwhelming success among the Argentine capital's intellectual circles, as did her second book, 'Los tres cantos' (The Three Songs), in which she explored eroticism and spirituality.e with the magazine Nosotros, which also published work by Gabriela Mistral and Ángel Cruchaga Santa María.
 In August 1917, her 20-year-old lover Horacio Ramos Mejía, committed suicide in front of Wilms Montt, and she left for New York City to collaborate with the Red Cross during World War I, but, after being accused of being a German spy, she was refused entry and was deported to Spain. There, she joined Madrid's bohemia and intellectual circle, befriending writer such as Joaquín Edwards Bello, Gómez de la Serna, Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Ramón del Valle-Inclán, going on to become the muse of the artist Julio Romero de Torres. In Madrid, which was to become her base from then on, she published a further two works under the pseudonym Teresa de la Cruz, which were widely praised by Spanish literary critics: 'En la Quietud del Mármol' (In the Stillness of Marble; 1918) and 'Anuarí' (1919). The first is an elegy of lyrical tone, composed of 35 fragments, with death as the central motive. Written in the first person, she focused her interest in the mediating role of the love of life. 'Anuarí', meanwhile, was a tribute to her dead lover Ramos Mejía.
During a visit to Buenos Aires, in 1919, she published her fifth book, 'Cuentos para hombres que todavía son niños' (Tales for Men Who Are Still Children), in which she evoked her childhood and some of her later relationships, in stories of great originality and fantasy.
She was a very very beautiful woman and a poet of the highest calibre. Unfortunately, this is news to much of the world Described by fearful right-wing critics as "embodying sexual aberrance and social prophesy", she embraced the anarchist ideas that were sweeping through the industrialised world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and took part in the aggressive anti-capitalist discourse that advocated full social revolution.
She continued to travel through Europe, visiting London and Paris, and it was in the latter in 1920 that she was reunited with his daughters after 5 years of separation, through the efforts of her diplomat father. However, shortly after their departure, she plunged into a deep depression , her soul broken and  became seriously ill and during this crisis she consumed a large dose of Veronal,and after a long period of agony, died on December 24, 1921. She was  only twenty-eight years old ,leaving behind a life full of intense and painful experiences, but also a writer who  lived a tumultuous , rebellious life who refused to conform to societies rules and the expectations  of her time and surroundings and left behind a great body ofwork that deserves to be recognized, but sadly her life is mostly forgotten. in her country and in the world, but at least is remembered in the 2009 film "Teresa: Crucificada por amar" by director Tatiana Gaviola.
In the last pages of her diary, she wrote:"Morir, después de haber sentido todo y no ser nada..." (Dying, having felt everything and being nothing ...)  

Teresa Wilms Montt - In the Stillness of Marble 

And when the sun spills out diamonds upon the world,
then I breathe in all the flowers, I see you in all the trees,

and I possess you tumbling, intoxicated with love,
on the lawns of fragrant grass.
And when the moon gives its humble blessing to men,
I see you gigantic, silhouetted by the sharp edges of a
lightning bolt; I see you enormous, confused with the immortal, scattering your indulgence over the world, soothing the desperation of so many suffering castaways;
I breathe you in the atmosphere, I imagine you in the mystery,
I extract you from nothingness.
It seems to me that the world was only made to help me evoke you,
and the sun to serve me as a lantern over the rugged path.