César Vallejo Criticism
César Vallejo (1892–1938), a Peruvian poet and innovative literary figure, is renowned as a pivotal voice in modern Spanish American literature. Vallejo's work is characterized by its stylistic innovation, marked by inventive wordplay and a departure from conventional poetic forms to explore themes of social injustice, alienation, and spiritual conflict. His poetry often grapples with the tension between physical desire and spirituality, reflecting the diverse influences of his time, including communism, Darwinism, and Spanish Modernism.
Vallejo, the youngest of eleven children, was born in Santiago de Chuco, Peru, and pursued his studies at Trujillo University. His early literary contributions were published in local newspapers, and he became associated with radical political circles. His 1922 collection, Trilce, written during a period of incarceration, marked a significant shift in his poetic voice, conveying themes of existential anguish and bitterness. The use of "raw" language in his work, as noted by Lorna Close, illustrates his commitment to exploring the limitations and potentials of language itself.
Vallejo's major works reflect a profound engagement with his cultural and political environment. His debut collection, Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds), is influenced by Spanish modernismo and reflects his connections to indigenous Peruvian and familial landscapes. His later collection, Poemas humanos (Human Poems), employs distorted syntax and orthography to express the plight of the poor and the quest for identity, as discussed by James Higgins in his analysis of Vallejo's thematic preoccupations.
Despite his writings' complexity, Vallejo's poetry remains of universal relevance and is celebrated for its deep exploration of human issues. His unique manipulation of language, as D. P. Gallagher observes, is a quest to unveil the deeper truths about human existence, making his work a profound study of both personal and collective human struggles. Vallejo's legacy is firmly established in the canon of twentieth-century Hispanic literature, underscored by his influence on subsequent generations of poets and thinkers.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Essays
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The Conflict of Personality in César Vallejo's Poemas Humanos
(summary)
In the excerpt below, Higgins discusses Vallejo's Human Poems, contending that this work demonstrates Vallejo's preoccupation with the theme of 'the individual… continually at war with himself.'
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César Vallejo: Profile of a Poet
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In the following overview of Vallejo's poetry, McDuffie examines the thematic and stylistic features of Trilce, Black Heralds, and Human Poems, as well as Vallejo's place in twentieth-century Hispanic literature.
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Visions of Solidarity
(summary)
In the following review of Poemas humanos/Human Poems, the critic provides an overview and comparison of The Black Heralds, Trilce, and Human Poems.
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César Vallejo (Peru, 1892-1938)
(summary)
In the essay below, Gallagher provides an overview of Vallejo's career.
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¡Viva Vallejo! ¡Arriba Espafia!
(summary)
In the review below, MacAdam favorably assesses César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, discussing thematic and stylistic features of Vallejo's verse and the translation problems posed by his writings.
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César Vallejo's Personal Earthquake
(summary)
In the essay below, Hart discusses historical and religious references in the poem "Terremoto," arguing that the historical figures mentioned are vital to understanding the poem's argument, which creatively relates religious debates to the personal spiritual anguish of the poet.
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The World Upside-Down in the Work of César Vallejo
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In the following excerpt, Hart explores Vallejo's treatment of the theme of the world turned upside-down, asserting that his early poetry and prose convey a desire to return to a silent paradise of animal simplicity, while his writings after his conversion to Communism depict both a world gone wrong and the hope for a future utopia.
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Vallejo, Heidegger and Language
(summary)
In the essay below, Close analyzes the linguistic richness of Vallejo's poetry, noting his innovative use of syntax, spelling, wordplay, and ambiguity. Noting similarities between Vallejo's verse and Heidegger's theories of language, the critic also relates Vallejo's focus on the nature of language and his attempt to address its limitations in order "to project a more accurate and authentic view of the human condition, of man's 'being-in-the-world.'"
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César Vallejo and the Stones of Darwinian Risk
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In the excerpt below, von Buelow assesses Vallejo's treatment of Darwinian and Marxist theory in his short story "Los caynas." The young man who narrates César Vallejo's short story "Los caynas" (1923) is shocked and terrified when he enters the house of a village family to find that those living there more closely resemble monkeys than they do humans. The narrator recoils from the howling and shrieking acrobatics of a woman whose "anthropoid image" is at once mechanical, child-like and bestial. This "regressive zoological obsession" comes as the third and final manifestation of what the narrator vaguely calls "the mysteries of reason [that] become thorns and well up in the closed and stormy circle of a fatal logic." Earlier episodes anticipate this singular species regression with an oblique, mysterious logic. A young man named Urquizo from the same village family falls prey to a peculiar form of madness: he boasts to those assembled at a bar that his horse has the extraordinary capacity to defy gravity and ride inverted, hooves pointing upward. Meeting Urquizo in the street one day, the narrator accidentally slips and bumps into him and evokes the angry protest, "Are you mad?" This last episode of "seeing things in reverse" appears to the shaken narrator as a "more transcendent [madness], nothing less than a ratiocination." The madman's psychic projection and the very certainty with which he insists on his own sanity threaten to overwhelm the secure boundaries of rationality within which reality is recognizable. Reason and madness are in danger of reversing positions, of exchanging places. And, Vallejo implies, these sensory and psychic reversals or inversions proceed according to a deterministic or "fatal logic" towards the eventual collective retrogression of species.
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The Conflict of Personality in César Vallejo's Poemas Humanos
(summary)
- Further Reading