After 1492, the Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals, diseases, and peoples between the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Maize, potatoes, sugar, horses, cattle, and plantation systems transformed land use on several continents. It was an ecological upheaval as much as a commercial and imperial one.

The exchange changed the material world of poetry: sugar islands, maize fields, potato plots, and devastated Indigenous homelands all entered literary memory. Later poets from Sor Juana to Pablo Neruda and Caribbean writers turned these altered landscapes into meditations on abundance, conquest, and loss.