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This study explores the construction of Burgos as a cultural icon; her early poetry's dialogue with her literary generation and historical context; the poems about immediate political events she wrote throughout her life; and the ways in which the experience of migration is embedded in her later works. The article first addresses her status as a cultural icon, which has added layers of meaning that tend to mystify her work. It stresses the strategies with which her first texts distanced themselves from their literary milieu, and analyses the rhetorical differences between her canonical poems and the more explicitly political ones that she published in journals during her lifetime, but remained largely unknown until the 1990's. Finally, it proposes that distance--a central part of the metaphorical ensemble and of the poetic voice's view of landscape and reality in her later poetry--ultimately refers to the experience of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]