SOURCE: “Modernismo and Borges,” in Borges the Poet, edited by Carlos Cortinez, The University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 161-69.

In the following essay, Paulau de Nemes examines the “modernist” aspects of Borges's early poetry.

“One of the cardinal functions of poetry”—wrote Octavio Paz—“is to show the other side, the wonders of everyday life: not poetic irreality, but the prodigious reality of the world.”¹ Borges' poetry performs this function. It may seem paradoxical to say this of a writer who has won worldwide acclaim by the imaginative character of his prose work, but the works of Borges the poet seem well anchored in the world of reality, from where he probes the other side of things.

Borges and his poetry resist classification. He broke away from Spanish Ultraism whose message he propagated. He had become an Ultraist in reaction to the previous movement, Spanish Modernism, to eliminate...