About the Author

José Garcia Villa was a renowned artist, born in Manila in 1908. Garcia Villa was a Filipino poet, short-story writer, painter, and literary critic, among other things. He was known for being one of the renowned “artists” of his time who believed that art should be made for art’s sake. 

After getting suspended from the University of the Philippines in 1929 for publishing a series of erotic poems, Garcia Villa made his way to the United States, where he studied at the University of New Mexico [1]. 

Villa was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.

Known for creating daring poetry that pushed boundaries, Garcia Villa was considered one of the greats of his time, alongside E.E. Cummings and Robert Frost.

His heritage and background as a Filipino poet set him apart from white poets of the early 1900s. In the Philippines, Villa became the arbiter of literary taste in the growing body of English language work being produced [2]. He taught poetry at City College and the New School, and held private poetry workshops in his Greenwich Village apartment.

The Poem

The thing about art is it can be interpreted in many ways. And when it comes to “The Emperor’s New Sonnet,” it may seem like there’s not much to interpret, but that is simply not the case.

Under normal circumstances, a poem analysis is filled with line-by-line assessments, getting a full understanding of the meter, the metaphor, the intertextuality, the symbolism of each stanza. But here, all we have is the title, and the author. 

Garcia Villa was widely known for his harsh criticism of poetry. In one essay, Garcia Villa wrote that there wasn’t anyone who was educated enough in poetry in the Philippines. The country, according to him, was “deluged with poet-simpletons—triflers in verse, poets without crania—the producers of featherweight poetry.”

And perhaps it was his frustration with Philippine poetry in English that drove him to create “The Emperor’s New Sonnet” [3]. This poem is believed to be a new take on the classic fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (but more on that later). 

Frustrated, or maybe even disgusted, with the praise that some of the Filipino poets were getting from the critics, he may have written the poem to target those who readily accept the so called “featherweight” poetry of his time, who were, perhaps, reading poetry in the same way that the emperor’s ministers and the townspeople were looking at the emperor’s suit. With this poem, Garcia Villa sought to serve as the child in the story to challenge what he felt was a sorry state of Philippine poetry in his time.

A Different Take on “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” written by Hans Christian Anderson, has been retold time and time again, but no writer gets straight to the point quite like Garcia Villa. 

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a fable that follows the emperor of a city who is fond of clothes. Two imposter weavers enter his city and tell him they will create a suit for him that would be invisible to stupid people. The weavers only pretend to weave the suit and present the fake suit to everyone in the city. Everyone who looks upon the suit is troubled by what they cannot see, and whether they are inadequate or not. Everyone lies and says they can see the suit. A child breaks everyone’s delusion by shouting out, “The Emperor is not wearing anything at all!” [4].

The story is an attack on snobbery and pretension, and makes fun of people who do not have their own say on what is beautiful and tend to rely on other people’s judgments before making their own. It tells its readers that sometimes, we need to view things as a child would so that we could plainly see what true beauty is, free from all social conditioning that often warps their perspective on things. 

With this in mind, let us now tackle the wordless poem by Garcia Villa. There is no beautiful weaving of words, and it seems like the poet is mocking the reader by telling them to accept the blankness as poetry, in the same way that the weavers the emperor in the story hired expects him to accept his invisible suit as one of the most beautiful in the world.

Themes

There is a fear of truth embedded in this poem. Humanity’s never-ending desire is placed plainly on the page underneath the title. There is nothing, and yet, there is everything. 

Emptiness, like the color white, is vast and full. The emptiness shows the poet’s true intentions: which is to release your perception of things. 

Further, the reader could borrow the moral lesson in the story and put it into the context of this poem. There are probably times when, like the characters in the story, we have felt the need to convince ourselves that a work of art is beautiful, just because some ruling body deemed it so, even though we ourselves did not genuinely appreciate it.

Oftentimes we are too quick to suppress our own judgments, for fear that other people may find us “less-cultured” if we do not agree with them. In turn, we no longer practice our critical thinking skills.

However, this shouldn’t be the case, and “The Emperor’s Sonnet” tells us this in its own wordless way. 

Perhaps it plays on how readers would think of it, on whether the blank space is a poem or not, while reminding them of the message in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes."

Buying Guide

• If you’re interested in learning more about “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” check out the physical copies sold at Thirftbooks.

• Or if you were moved by Garcia Villa’s poem, Biblio sells the complete works of Jose Garcia Villa.

• Book your trip to Manila to see where Garcia Villa grew up through Travelocity.

• Of course if you’re unable to make it to Manila, the least you could do is incorporate this rich-in-history city into your own home. iCanvas sells a beautiful canvas map of the city, ranging in sizes from 8x12 to 40x60.

• If you want to take a stab at performative poetry yourself, consider writing it on the pages of a Paper notebook.