Poetry in Pieces C&233sar Vallejo and Lyric Modernity [Paperback]

Set against the cultural and political backdrop of interwar Europe and the Americas,Poetry in Piecesis the first major study of the Peruvian poet C?sar Vallejo (18921938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settingsPeru and Pariswhich were continually crisscrossed by new developments in aesthetics, politics, and practices of everyday life; his poetry and prose therefore need to be read in connection with modernity in all its forms and spaces. Michelle Clayton combines close readings of Vallejos writings with cultural, historical, and theoretical analysis, connecting Vallejoand Latin American poetryto the broader panorama of international modernism and the avant-garde, and to writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Georges Bataille, and Charlie Chaplin.Poetry in Piecessheds new light on one of the key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, while exploring ways of rethinking the parameters of international lyric modernity.

Michelle Claytonis Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Introduction: The Whole, the Part!

1. Pachyderms in Poetry and Prose
2. Invasion of the Lyric
3. Lyric Matters
4. Lyric Technique, Aesthetic Politics
5. New World Views
6. Making Poetry History

Conclusion: Poetry and Crime

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

This excellent study abounds with insights on an intriguing author.

Ground-breaking. . . . Combines a highly attuned sense of the cultural?milieu in which Vallejo lived with a set of original readings of his poems.