Romanticism in Castilian Poetry shows Vallejo’s early generational awareness; his ability to perceive the intimate relation between philosophies and aesthetic trends through the course of major historical transitions; his affinity for the idiosyncratic writer, the authentic outlier detested by traditionalists; and the autonomous exaltation of deeply felt poetry. The bitterness and irony of neoclassical poetry revealed the decay of that era and the romantics’ need for new modalities of thought and art. This notion of salvaging from the past only what is essential and discarding dead weight in the name of transformation crosscuts Vallejo’s oeuvre and becomes the principle axis of his eventual critique of the European and Latin American avant-garde.
This brings us to Vallejo’s first book of poems, The Black Heralds, which was written in 1916–18 during the high tide of the Trujillo bohemia and stands as a testament to the hybridity of the author’s cultural identity and the autochthony of his poetic voice that dominates this early collection. Published in Lima by Souza Ferreira in 1918 and released on July 23, 1919, it’s divided into six sections: “Agile Soffits,” “Divers,” “Of the Earth,” “Imperial Nostaligas,” “Thunderclaps,” and “Songs of Home.” The Black Heralds is generally celebrated for its linguistic originality, tonic authenticity, treatment of Andean reality, and the potent emblem of nostos that resurfaces in multiple forms throughout the poetic movement.
Vallejo inherits from the romantic tradition the dark side, inspired by the Satanism and Cainism of Byron and Espronceda, which would later manifest itself as a feeling of accursedness, as seen in Baudelaire.64 The Peruvian’s early poetics are of this genealogy and, while it’s true that he seems to pay homage to Darío with impressively composed Alexandrine sonnets, silvas, and an overall mastery of very complex meter and rhyme, he also breaks away from this and uses it as a springboard to produce a poetic form that would accommodate his thematic content: crisis. This subversion of traditional form is a function of the expulsion of authority. “Vallejo projects his inner struggles onto an order that exceeds his individuality but cannot save him: ‘I was born on a day / when God was sick.’ … The omnipotent deity has been purged from Vallejo’s poetry.”65
In The Black Heralds Vallejo dramatizes individual experience and elevates it to the category of myth, now with moral guilt before a cruel and vengeful God—“There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know! / Blows as from the hatred of God” (“The Black Heralds”)—now with the curse of unintelligibility and the threat of a meaningless existence—“So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes / belching out its funeral march into the Void” (“The Voice in the Mirror”)—now looking for lucidity in pain—“I am the blind corequenque / who sees through the lens of a wound” (“Huaco”).
The linguistic originality of The Black Heralds, which indigenists saw as a forerunner of their movement, plays out through Vallejo’s incorporation of a Quechua vocabulary within his Castilian verse. Since he was not a native speaker of Quechua, but probably acquired it through reading and being in proximity to native speakers into his twenties, his employment of Quechua and pre-Incan words and phrases signals a unique synthetic feature of his writing—one that summons forth the native voice as a deliberate project. Thus, “Imperial Nostalgias” takes us to “a lake soldering crude mirrors / where shipwrecked Manco Capac weeps,” and in “Ebony Leaves” we find “the mood of ancient camphors / that hold vigil tahuashando down the path,” or in his “Autochthonous Tercet” the sounds of a “yaraví” and “[q]uenaing deep sighs [of] the Pallas” evoke the hybridity through sound. Perhaps this trademark feature appears most clearly in “Huaco,” where the poet proclaims that he is “Incan grace, gnawing at itself / in golden coricanchas baptized / with phosphates of error and hemlock.”
The Quechua voice in The Black Heralds counts as Vallejo’s first step toward a poetics of mestizaje, a project he continued to modify through the development of later works, such as Toward the Reign of the Sciris and The Tired Stone. This sign of miscegenation is indicative of the direction Vallejo’s writing would take and of the optics through which he would cast his critical eye on European culture in the years to come. By inscribing Andean reality into the symbolist literary tradition, in The Black Heralds Vallejo stakes out a poetic space on the peripheries of a literature suffering the symptoms of cultural homogeny, thus foreshadowing the proliferation of a new sensibility, grounded fundamentally in Marxist dialectics.
Vallejo’s second book of poems, Trilce, was first published in 1922 in Lima by Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría with a prologue by Antenor Orrego and then again in 1930 in Madrid by Compañía Iberoamericana de Publicaciones with a prologue by José Bergamín. It collects seventy-seven poems composed 1918–22, each titled with a roman numeral. Prior to its 1922 publication—that golden year of high modernism—no book had been written in Castilian that was so obsessed with the arbitration of poetic inflection as was Trilce, with its bizarre mixture of traditional form and poetic subversion, its technical acrobatics, its view beyond the then prevailing symbolist trends, and an unabashed sentimentality toward the loss of the poet’s mother, which clashes with his anguish from being incarcerated in Trujillo Central Jail, where about one-third of the collection was written.66
It’s hard to imagine where Hispanic literature would be today had Vallejo not written Trilce, a book that bears all the bravado of European avant-garde literature but refuses to adopt a consistent aesthetic and even goes so far as to mock the stylistically obsessed. So great has this book’s impact been on twentieth-century Hispanic poetry that when we consider any other modern literary work of radical innovation, we’re forced to ask if it came before or after Vallejo’s great poetic adventure. To put it frankly, even though Vicente Huidobro had already published El espejo de agua as early as 1916, Vallejo’s Trilce is the indisputable catalyst of the Latin American experimental tradition and “the most radical book in the Castilian language.”67
Unlike Vallejo’s first and last collections, the poems of Trilce aren’t neatly packaged into a thematic sequence but appear more like a boiling kettle of great obsessions with the Origin, Incompletion, Imperfection, Orphanhood, and Death, which the poet stirs with masochistic perversity. In Trilce Vallejo evokes “a world whose two poles are immediate sensation and memory, the perception of incoherent diversity and the closed space of the irremediable.”68 Armed with uncanny technical abilities and dizzying poetic intensity, Vallejo is determined to work within these two poles without placing his emotional content inside any imported form, and the strength of his conviction transforms into exhortations, rejections, repudiations, and even mockery. Thus, the opening line of the book—“Who’s making all that racket”—takes aim at the prolific hackneyed aesthetes of an imported French symbolist school and, in so doing, celebrates autochthonous expression and ushers in a new era of Hispanic poetry.
The drama of Trilce arises through webs of inner tensions in which disparate themes and figures are bonded by unorthodox techniques (hence, the famous “union of contraries”). The search for harmony is possible only because of the presence of dissonance that saturates the poems, and in that dissonance resides the fear that harmony may not be reached, that it may not be reachable or, as in poem LXX, that we may not be able to know if it has been reached or is reachable, since “we shudder to step forth, for we know not whether