Borges y la poesía modernista

Like other avant-garde poets, in his youth, Jorge Luis Borges rejected modernism. He increasingly came to recognise, however, its central influence on twentieth-century Hispanophone poetry. The article draws attention to Borges’profound affinity with the symbolism of the end of the nineteenth century, beginning with his writings about his predecessor Walt Whitman as the progenitor of modern poetry. Its principal focus is the influence of the modernist renovation of poetic language which is consonant with Borges’ emphasis on the intonation and breathing (entonación y respiración) of verse, his reflections on the relationship between distance and emotion, and on the conscious autonomy of literature and its relationship to personal experience.