The Poetry and Poetics of Jorge Luis Borges

This study traces Borges’ career as a poet from his earliest poetic endeavors before the 1923 publication of Fervor de Buenos Aires through the middle of the 1960’s. Paul Cheselka considers Borges’ better-known poetry collections, such as Fervor de Buenos Aires, Luna de enfrente, and Cuaderno San Martín; and he shows the often-neglected 1930-1960 period to be an important phase in the evolution of Borges’ poetry. The poems are studied chronologically with particular emphasis on the relation of their themes to the poet’s life and ideas. Cheselka’s contribution is that of providing a clearer delineation of borgesian poetics; the poems themselves are shown to be the evidence and very substance of the poets’s definitions.