SOURCE: "Themes," in Fire and Ice: The Poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia, U.N.C. Dept. of Romance Languages, 1976, pp. 105-54.

In the following excerpt, Foster provides an overview of major and minor themes—including solitude, love, death, and others—in Villaurrutia's poetry.

General

Villaurrutia's poetry turns on three obsessions which find expression as the three principal themes: 1) human beings live separated one from another in inevitable and anguished solitude; 2) love, when it exists, is incomplete, secret, impossible, and at times illicit; 3) death is a constant presence in an empty and solitary existence. In the first section of this chapter, I shall examine these three thematic groupings as exemplified in a number of important poems.

In addition to the three main themes, there are several smaller complexes of meaning which will be discussed in the second part: poetry and the poetic muse, nature and the peaceful life, religious experience...