César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence

This 1996 book was the first full-length study in English of the poetry of the Peruvian, César Vallejo (1892–1938).

Jean Franco (Author)

9780521157810, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 2012

312 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.4 kg

This 1976 book was the first full-length study in English of the poetry of the Peruvian César Vallejo (1892–1938). A major poet, who approached the problem of revolutionary aesthetics in a manner radically different from that of his contemporaries, Vallejo was comparatively little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. This neglect is attributable to the difficulty of a poetry which deliberately resists interpretation and assimilation into the established order of things. Professor Franco's book is therefore an exploration of the problems of poetic production. In the opening biographical chapter, she shows the kind of social constraints which limited what the poet could say, which led him in Trilce (1922) to write a hermetic poetry using euphemism, pun and indirection. She goes on to explore Vallejo's later poetry, which was shaped by the Spanish Civil War and gestures towards the tentative nature of humanity and civilisation that gives the poetry its abiding relevance.

Preface
Abbreviations
1. Poetry as a mode of existence
2. The alienated romantic: Los heraldos negros
3. The body as text: nature and culture in Vallejo's poetics
4. The end of the sovereign illusion: Trilce
5. The discourse of the given: Trilce
6. Art and revolution
7. The dialectics of man and nature
8. The destruction of Prometheus: Poemas humanos
9. The mirror of the world: España, aparta de mí este cáliz
10. The invention of Vallejo
Guide to texts and criticism
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]