Many early works of writers are amateurish and only hint of the talent that later blossoms as the skills mature. In the case of Vallejo, however, the first line of the first poem, “The Black Heralds,” has become a super star in the world of poetry, and the collection of the same name in which this poem appears, Vallejo’s first published collection, continued into the early 2000s to rate serious academic study among literary scholars.

Efrain Kristal, writing for the American Poetry Review, suggests that the palpable intensity of the first line is what makes it one of the most well-known lines in Latin American poetry. Kristal says that the strong pathos is “not in the words that can be recited but in the silence of the ellipsis. One feels the breath knocked out of the poetic voice” as he...