SOURCE: "The Poetry," in Xavier Villaurrutia, Twayne Publishers, 1971, pp. 31-68.

In the following excerpt, Dauster chronicles the development of Villaurrutia's poetic style from Reflections and his earliest work to Song to Spring and the later poems.

Xavier Villaurrutia's poetic production was quantitatively slight: the "early poems" included in the collected works, Reflections (1926), the definitive edition of Nostalgia of Death (1946), and Song to Spring (1948). This restricted production was due to the fact that Villaurrutia was not, in spite of the verbal facility which characterizes much of his work, a facile poet. Writing was, for Villaurrutia, a long process of maturation of his thought until the moment of actual creation over which he had little control; he wrote, as he himself said, inevitably:

It is not possible for me to tell myself: I am going to start writing!, it is necessary to abandon myself for a long time during which...