The Chronology of César Vallejo’sPoemas humanos:
New Light on the Old Problem
Stephen M. Hart
(University College London)

Since the publication of César Vallejo’s Poemas humanos in 1939 by Georgette de Vallejo scholars have had to content themselves with guesswork as to the chronology of the poems. While the Spanish Civil War poems, collected as España, aparta de mí este cáliz, and to some extent the group of early poems called Poemas en prosa by Georgette, have rarely been at the centre of controversy in terms of their chronology, the Poemas humanos have. Questions such as: When were the poems originally written? When were they typed up? and Can the typescripts be considered final versions? have remained unanswered, or at the very least contentious, to this day. The discovery in the early 1990s by Juan Fló of the photocopies of a bundle of poems in the private archives of Ángel Rama in Montevideo, however, has changed the field considerably. This essay assesses the importance of Fló’s discovery for a new understanding of the chronology of the Poemas humanos, and allows us to make some important new formulations about questions which for too long have been shrouded in mystery.
Juan Fló published an important article about his discovery in 1996, but it took the academic community a while to catch up with the significance of what this meant for Vallejo scholarship. My own view is that it is the single most important new discovery about Vallejo since the publication of the editio princeps of the Poemas humanos in 1939. The bundle of papers consists of photocopies of a number of manuscript, i.e. pre-typescript, versions of Vallejo’s posthumous poems. They were sent to Rama by Georgette at some point in the 1970s when the former was intending to bring out an edition of Vallejo’s work in the Ayacucho series, and they lay undiscovered among Rama’s personal papers until unearthed by Fló’s detective work in the early 1990s. It is hoped to bring out a facsimile edition of these poems with Tamesis in the near future, and what follows is a brief description of their contents. The batch of poems consists of the manuscript, pre-typescript version of the following poems. In all cases a reference is provided for the typescript version which ensued from the original manuscript version:

Poemas humanos
1. ‘Los desgraciados’ (no date); Silva-Santisteban, III, pp. 414-15.
2. ‘El acento me pende del zapato...’ (12 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 365.
3. ‘La punta del hombre...’ (14 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 366.
4. ‘¡Oh botella sin vino! ¡Oh botella....’ (16 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 367.
5. ‘Al fin, un monte...’ (19 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 369.
6. ‘Quiere y no quiere su color mi pecho...’ (22 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 370.
7. ‘La paz, la obispa, el taco, las vertientes..’ (25 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 373.
8. ‘Transido, salmónico, impelente...’ (26 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 374.
9. ‘Señor ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido?...’ (27 September 1937); which subsequently became ‘¿Y bien? ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido?...’; Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 375.
10. ‘Escarnecido, aclimatado al bien, mórbido, hurente...’ (7 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 379.
11. ‘Alfonso, estás mirándome, lo veo...’ (9 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 380. Date is on manuscript only and not on typescript.
12. ‘Traspié entre dos estrellas’ (11 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 381. Date is on manuscript only and not on typescript.
13. ‘El libro de la naturaleza’ (21 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 384.
14. ‘A lo mejor, soy otro...’ (21 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 383.
15. ‘Batallón de dioses’ (22 October 1937), which subsequently became ‘Marcha nupcial’; Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 386.
16. ‘Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal...’ (22 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 385.
17. ‘La cólera que rompe al hombre en niños...’ (26 October 1937), which became ‘La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños...’; Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 387.
18. ‘Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro...’ (5 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 399.
19. ‘Hoy le ha entrado una astilla...’ (6 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 400.
20. ‘El alma que sufrió de ser su cuerpo...’ (8 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 402.
21. ‘Viniere el malo, con un trono al hombro...’ (19 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 407.
22. ‘Ande desnudo el millonario...’ (19 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, pp. 405-06.
23. ‘Al revés de las aves del monte...’ (20 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 408.
24. ‘Ello es que el lugar donde me pongo...’ (21 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, III, p. 409España, aparta de mí este cáliz

1. ‘Pequeño responso a un héroe de la República’ (10 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p. 107.
2. ‘Cortejo tras la toma de Bilbao’ (13 September 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p. 104.
3. ‘Oigo bajo tu pie el humo del lobo humano..’ (8 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p. 97; Larrea, Poesía completa, pp. 761-62.
4. ‘Apremia, traza pómulos morales la huesosa tiniebla...’ (8 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p. 98; Larrea, Poesía completa, pp. 763-64.
5. ‘¡Pérdida de Toledo...’ (9 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, pp. 98-99; Larrea, Poesía completa, pp. 765-66.
6. Second cleaner version of ‘¡Pérdida de Toledo...’ (9 October 1937); see 5 above.
7. ‘¡Cuídate, España, de tu propia España!...’ (10 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p. 112.
8. ‘Después, el espectáculo...’ (10 October 1937); war poem later discarded.
9. ‘De aquí, desde este punto...’ (10 October 1937); Silva-Santisteban, IV, p 99; Larrea, Poesía completa, p. 767.
10. ‘Himno fúnebre a los escombros de Durango’ (22 October 1937); this poem exists in three versions, two of which are manuscript, and one of which is a typescript; Silva-Sanisteban, IV, p. 111.
11. ‘Varios días el aire, compañeros...’ (5 November 1937); Silva-Sanisteban, IV, p. 105.
12. ‘Solía escribir con su dedo grande en el aire...’ (5 November 1937); Silva-Santisteban, p. 100, 102; Larrea, Poesía completa, pp. 734-35.
13. ‘Los mendigos pelean por España...’ (no date); Silva-Sanisteban, IV, p. 102; Larrea, Poesía completa, p. 771.
14. ‘Badajoz’ (no date); Larrea, Poesía completa, pp. 761-62.
15. ‘Invierno en la batalla de Teruel’ (no date); typescript rather than manuscript; Silva- Santisteban, IV, p. 108.

These manuscripts offer a fascinating insight into the various changes that Vallejo’s poems went through before reaching their final form. The poems from Poemas humanos are, in all but one case (‘Los desgraciados’), dated poems, and, taken together, they constitute almost exactly half of the total number of the dated poems (of which there are 49). Thus, about half of the dated poems from Poemas humanos are missing, to be precise: ‘Calor, cansado voy con mi oro, a donde...’ (4 September 1937), ‘Un pilar soportando consuelos...’ (6 September 1937), ‘Al cavilar en la vida, al cavilar...’ (7 September 1937), ‘Poema para ser leído y cantado’ (7 September 1937), ‘Va corriendo, andando, huyendo...’ (18 September 1937), ‘Esto...’ (23 September 1937), ‘Quedéme a calentar la tinta en que me ahogo...’ (24 September 1937), ‘De puro calor, tengo frío...’ (29 September 1937), ‘Confianza en el anteojo, no en el ojo...’ (5 October 1937), ‘¿Hablando de la leña, callo el fuego?...’ (6 October 1937), ‘Despedida recordando un adiós’ (12 October 1937), ‘Intensidad y altura’ (27 October 1937), ‘Guitarra’ (28 October 1937), ‘Oye a tu masa, a tu cometa, escúchalos; no gimas...’ (29 October 1937); ‘¿Qué me da, que me azoto con la línea...’ (30 October 1937), ‘Aniversario’ (31 October 1937), ‘Panteón’, (31 October 1937), ‘Un hombre está mirando a una mujer...’ (2 November 1937), ‘Dos niños anhelantes’ (2 November 1937), ‘Me viene, hay días, una gana ubérrima, política...’ (6 November 1937), ‘Palmas y guitarra’ (8 November 1937), ‘Yuntas’ (9 November 1937), ‘Acaba de pasar el que vendrá...’ (12 November 1937), ‘En suma, no poseo para expresar mi vida, sino mi muerte...’ (25 November 1937), ‘Otro poco de calma, camarada...’ (28 November 1937), and ‘Sermón sobre la muerte’ (8 December 1937), namely 26 poems. Since this is almost exactly half of the dated poems, it is possible to speculate that Georgette had sent Rama a sample of her deceased husband’s posthumous poems rather than the whole collection.

There are a number of conclusions which can be drawn from even a quick consultation of the poems. Since in all cases the date of composition on the manuscript is the same as the date listed on the typescript (only in two cases was it not transferred; see poems 11 and 12 of Poemas humanos listed above), we must conclude that the poems were composed on the date given and, also, that it is very likely that they were typed up on the same day as well. It is also clear when comparing the dates that Vallejo was very busy during the autumn of 1937 composing and typing poems which would eventually come together in two separate collections; the dates show he was criss-crossing between Poemas humanos and España, aparta de mí este cáliz, rather than finishing one before the other. It is also likely that Vallejo started dating his poems in the autumn of 1937 in order to keep a track of them, since it is quite clear that his poetic output rose sharply during this period.
The aim of this essay is to take a fresh look at the chronology of the Poemas humanos since this has been the bone of contention over the years, but a related question inevitably presents itself: since Fló discovered photocopies rather than the originals, where are the original manuscripts? Since the manuscripts themselves were not found when Georgette died, it is to be presumed that she destroyed them before her death. What persuaded her to do such a thing? An analysis of the heated debate which occurred about the Poemas humanos will, as I hope to show, give us some clues as to why this happened.

Reading the Larrea versus Georgette saga is like watching a cat and mouse saga in which every single thing that one of the contenders says is out of principle denied by the other. Let me give an example of this tit-for-tat pattern. When Georgette brought out the editio princeps of Vallejo’s posthumous poetry in 1939, she put all of the poems together and called them Poemas humanos. This led to various complaints, not only from Larrea, who questioned whether the title had been chosen by the author. It became clear that it had, indeed, not been chosen by the author when Georgette then brought out the famous facsimile edition of the posthumous poetry in 1968 in which, as she now argued, there were in fact three separate collections of poems: ‘Los poemas en prosa al aparecer sin su propio título Poemas en prosa, y a ser unidos a Poemas humanos como si formasen una sola obra, habían perdido su carácter de unidad independiente’. The same criterion -- she argued -- should be applied to España, aparta de mí este cáliz which was also a separate volume. No-one would argue with the statement about the Civil War poems since they were so obviously an independent collection of poems, but the fact that now Georgette was rectifying the titles meant that even a non-prejudiced observer would deduce that she was inventing her stories as she went along. Indeed, to make matters worse, in her essay which accompanied the facsimile edition, Georgette had gone out of her way to pour scorn on the opinions of certain critics, particularly Larrea, which had emerged in the interregnum years between 1939 and 1968. For example, in an important lecture given on 15 April 1957, ‘César Vallejo o Hispanoamerica en la cruz de su razón’, Larrea had argued that it was the Spanish Civil War which had galvanised Vallejo’s poetic creativity, since he had not been writing poetry for years: ‘cuando en 1936 estalla la gran tragedia española -- hoy todavía inconclusa -- todo se vuelca en y sobre Vallejo. Ha llegado la hora transcendental para la que su existencia venía especializándose desde el principio. Se dispone a entrar en la escena ocupada por el torbellino arrebatador de que dan razón sus Poemas póstumos, su España, aparta de mí este cáliz y su muerte. Todo hasta allí había sido preámbulo en buena cuenta.’ As Larrea put it even more forcefully: ‘En 1936 llevaba catorce años de silencio poético casi absoluto’ (p. 52). It was statements such as these that provoked Georgette -- since the implication was that her relationship with Vallejo had destroyed him as a poet -- to attempt to disprove them. In a sense, these statements were calculated to damage Georgette personally, and they certainly had an effect on her. In her various statements made later on, she asserted over and over again that Vallejo had been writing poetry during the 1930s. She strove, for example, to prove that Vallejo’s works could be split up into phases, and she introduced 1931/32 as the decisive point of change in Vallejo’s poetry. This is what she said in 1968: ‘Poemas humanos emerge en realidad, en octubre de 1931 con unos versos nacidos en la inmensa y lejana Unión Soviética que Vallejo unirá a otro de octubre a noviembre de 1937: ‘¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona!...’. Ya es en París, en febrero de 1932, que surgirá esta nueva etapa de la poética de Vallejo, prosiguiéndose hasta el 21 de noviembre de 1937, e interrumpido durante unos meses por la guerra civil de España’ (‘Apuntes biográficos’, p. 10). She then went on to mention the poems which had been inspired by the visit to the Soviet Union: ‘Del entusiasmo de su tercer y último viaje a la U.R.S.S. -- aunque inextricablemente asociados con recuerdos de la tierra natal -- brotan ‘Salutación angélica’, ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina...’, ‘Telúrica y magnetica’, ‘Gleba’, y entre otros más: ‘Fue domingo...’, ‘Pero antes de que se acabe...’, ‘Piensan los viejos asnos’, ‘Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos’ (‘Apuntes biográficos’, p. 10). On the face of it, this would seem to be a fairly uncontentious statement. Even a cursory reading of Vallejo’s journalism and, particularly, his travelogue, Rusia en 1931 (1931) reveals that he had become immensely enthusiastic about communism and Soviet society during those years, so it would seem natural that some of this political zeal would spill over into his poetry. It could be argued, though, that the poems mentioned give less the impression of raw reactions to the Soviet Union, as of a state of mind in which the Peruvian aspect to the world dilemma is being thought through, and Peru was gradually being seen, projected, and idealised as belonging to the Soviet/natural pole of life. But, aside from this proviso, statements such as these allowed Georgette to question Larrea’s view that Vallejo’s career as a poet had nose-dived in the late 1920s and 1930s, only to emerge miraculously in the six months or so before his death.

But, at times, Georgette let her enthusiasm get the better of her and she made statements which were, at best, misleading and, at worse, untrue. Let me give an example. In her 1968 essay she lists the following poems as those which were written in 1936: ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, ‘Poema para ser leído y cantado’, ‘De disturbio en disturbio’, ‘Calor, cansado voy con mi oro, a donde...’, ‘Panteón’, ‘Acaba de pasar...’, ‘La vida, esta vida...’, ‘Palmas y guitarras’, ‘¡Y si después de tántas palabras...’, and ‘Despedida recordando un adiós’ (‘Apuntes biográficos’, p. 11). First of all, it is difficult to accept that Georgette could have remembered some thirty-five years later the exact time when certain poems were written, bearing in mind that she had said that she was initially surprised on Vallejo’s death to find so many unpublished poems. But, apart from this, Fló’s discovery provides us with independent, non-biased evidence as to when some of the poems Georgette mentions here were written, and some of them were, in fact, written and typed up a year later than she said. ‘Calor, cansado voy con mi oro, a donde......’ was written on 4 September 1937, ‘Poema para ser leído y cantado’ on 7 September 1937, ‘Despedida recordando un adiós’, on 12 October 1937, and ‘Palmas y guitarras’, on 8 November 1937. Fló’s discovery, therefore, provides irrefutable evidence that Georgette was re-constructing a version of events rather than remembering them. Some would call this lying.

Let me give another example of how this process of tit-for-tat worked. In her ‘Apuntes biográficos’ (1968), Georgette, as we have seen above, provided a list of poems which were written as a result of Vallejo’s enthuasism for the Soviet Union, but she had failed to mention the poem ‘Primavera tuberosa’ which -- given its content which is evident based on even a cursory reading -- would seem to fit naturally within a group of Soviet Union phase poems. This fact led André Coyné to allude to its unknown source of inspiration in a turn of phrase (‘cuya procedencia se nos oculta’) which could only be read as pointing an accusing finger as Georgette. This in turn led Georgette to publish another essay in 1978, Allá ellos, allá ellos, allá ellos, in which she poured scorn on Coyné’s words, saying that the poem in fact did belong to this particular group of poems, before making rather bizarre, barbed comments such as: ‘Por el comentario vemos que el señor Coyné ve ocultaciones por todas partes’, and: ‘Es de observar que ningún poema, de Vallejo, o de quien sea, es “procedente” de revista alguna. Es procedente del cerebro de su autor’. Again, the impartial observer would tend to agree that a poem like ‘Primavera tuberosa’ would seem to fit naturally within the group to which Georgette (after being challenged) has assigned it, but the manner in which the argument is couched leads one to demur.

What conclusion should one draw from the above? Should we, as a result of this finding, disqualify Georgette from making any judgements about the posthumous poems? Should we accept Juan Larrea’s version hook, line and sinker? For various reasons, as we shall see, I do not believe that either of these options is possible. We have seen that Georgette was clearly being over-zealous in providing chronological information about her deceased husband’s poems, but does this necessarily disqualify her from being aware that Vallejo was writing poetry during those years that Larrea said were characterised by ‘catorce años de silencio poético casi absoluto’. Since Georgette was living with Vallejo on a daily basis from the late 1920s until his death, and indeed Larrea spent a great deal of time in Peru in the early 1930s, we are at liberty to propose that Georgette would have been in a much better position than Larrea to know whether Vallejo continued to write. Is it too much to assume that a wife cannot know whether her husband is writing poetry? Is it not logical to assume that, whereas she may have been wrong about the specifics, she could well have been right about the principle (i.e. that Vallejo was writing poetry)? As we shall see, Georgette gives examples of some of the heated conversations she had with Vallejo during these years which, I believe, lend greater credence to her overall case. We may assume that she knew he had been writing poetry during the period characterised by an ‘almost complete poetic silence’ according to Larrea, without being too sure about the specifics. Over the years she was being pushed into a corner and, rather than admit that she simply did not know, she chose to brazen it out with, as we shall see, disastrous consequences for Vallejo’s pre-typescript manuscripts.

In an essay which was surely intended to publicly humiliate Georgette, ‘Los poemas póstumos, a la luz de su edición facsimilar’ (1974), Larrea sought to attack the very basis of Georgette’s authority. It is a devastating attack and reduces to rubble two very important butresses of Georgette’s argument, the first of which concerns the titles of the poetry, and the second of which concerns the issue of the chronology of the poems. The bulk of Larrea’s argument is based on the typewriters that Vallejo used in typing up his posthumous poems and it is so detailed and conscientious that Georgette -- not trained as an academic -- would have felt very wary of responding. Larrea used a very sophisticated, convincing argument about which typewriters had been used when in order to make some humilliating claims; firstly that Georgette put ‘¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona!...’ at the end of Poemas humanos in order to give the impression that Vallejo’s last thoughts were for her (pp. 67-69). He furthermore attacks the idea that Poemas en prosa and Poemas humanos are two distinct volumes of poetry (pp. 80-85). Most importantly for our purposes he also argues that the date of typing is also the date of composition (p. 74-75). At this point one could speculate that Georgette, who had the pre-typescript manuscripts in her possession, would only have needed to look at them in order to discover that, in fact, Larrea was right and that the date of composition was the same as the date of typing up, as a comparison of the dates on the manuscript and the typescript shows. This caused her, again we may speculate, not only to conceal the existence of the manuscripts -- though she had slipped up by letting one rogue copy end up in Ángel Rama’s safe -- but, also, to destroy them before her death. This is one reason why, I believe, we at our peril ignore the venomous debates which have surrounded Vallejo’s work.

If we can now perhaps understand the motives for Georgette’s actions, we can also perhaps attempt to put together a picture of what was going on in her mind, and thereby find some clues which will lead us to the truth about the chronology of Vallejo’s posthumous poems. Indeed, given that Georgette and Larrea were without doubt the two individuals who were closest to Vallejo, how are we to proceed? At times their widely diverging statements have led to a terrible muddle. I suggest that the best way to proceed is to distinguish between the two of them in terms of their authority with regard to certain periods of time. For example, when Georgette stated that ‘Salutación angélica’ was written during Vallejo’s third visit to the Soviet Union (i.e. October 1931), whereas Larrea disagrees and, seemingly just for the hell of it, says it was written during Vallejo’s second visit (October 1928), I believe we are at liberty to ascribe greater authority to Georgette when we take into account a circumstantial piece of evidence (Georgette accompanied Vallejo to the Soviet Union on the third trip). Contrariwise, when Larrea states his disagreement with regard to Georgette in terms of the chronology of the dated poems (Georgette says the dates are not always the date of composition, whereas Larrea says they are), again we should take into account a circumstantial piece of evidence (Fló’s discovery of a copy of the pre-typescript manuscripts) and assign greater authority to Larrea. This is why, I believe, it is important to distinguish between Larrea and Georgette as to their areas of authority. It is plausible to argue that Larrea has little or no authority to speak about Vallejo’s actions in the early 1930s -- and especially while in the Soviet Union -- because he was not there. Secondly, given Larrea’s close interest in Vallejo’s work in the later period of the Peruvian poet’s life, it seems reasonable to assume that he has more authority to speak about Vallejo’s actions and intentions during this particular period. Put simply, Larrea’s area of expertise is the dated poems of Poemas humanos, Georgette’s the undated. This division of authority makes sense if we accept the hypothesis that the dated poems were written over a short compacted period (3 September 1937 until 8 December 1937 or, at the very latest -- if we include the hand-written corrections to the manuscripts -- shortly before Vallejo fell ill, which occurred on Sunday 13 March 1938), while the undated poems were written over an extended period of time (i.e. from mid-1920s until the mid-1930s). The confusion has arisen when each of the two personalities has sought to gain jurisdiction over enemy territory, namely, with the aim of speaking on behalf of the whole of Vallejo’s work. Once we discount the respective ability of Georgette and Larrea to speak about the province of the other, various hypotheses drop into place. In conclusion, the compromise I propose is as follows: Larrea is more often than not right when he discusses the poems Vallejo wrote during the last six months of his life (since, if nothing else, Fló’s discovery shows this to be the case), but only when referring to the dated poems. Georgette, on the other hand, has more authority to speak about the undated poems since she was with Vallejo on a daily basis when he wrote them; although, even here, we have to be careful since (as we have seen) she was often right in principle rather than about the specifics.

There is, though, an area about which both Georgette and Larrea were clearly wrong, and this concerns the titles of the collections of Vallejo’s posthumous poetry. We have already noted the serious holes in Georgette’s argument with regard to the titles; in fact, her argument - which changed over the years -- was never really an argument as such, but simply a statement of an opinion, which was then presented as true. The division proposed by her between Poemas en prosa and Poemas humanos does not hold water. Yet, curiously enough, Larrea’s argument about the poetry suffers from the same short-sightedness, which is all the more disappointing given how effectively and painstakingly he discusses the typewriters that Vallejo used in the last few months of his life. Though his own version of the titles is adumbrated in the 1974 essay, ‘Poemas póstumos, a la luz de su edición facsimilar’, it moves to centre stage in the edition of Vallejo’s poetry Larrea published four years later. Larrea proposes therein two new titles: ‘Lo cierto es que, una vez puesto aparte el conjunto sobre España, el casi centenar de los poemas que restan se dividen naturalmente en dos porciones. Por sí mismo se destaca el gran grupo poemático que se inscribe en el periodo de la tragedia española que galvanizó el alma del poeta, o sea, a partir de ‘París, Octubre 1936’. Por su título, el poema establece una no sólo precisa sino deliberada partición a uno y otro lado de tan explícita marca divisoria’. To be frank, this is no better than Georgette’s division. It is just as arbitrary. Whereas Georgette had been trying to make the distinction in terms of the point in time when Vallejo turned his mind to Marxism and social issues, Larrea had been trying to identity that point at which Vallejo’s mind turned towards the Spanish Civil War. An objective asessment is that both fail. And Larrea makes exactly the same mistake as Georgette by attempting to provide titles for works which -- if the truth be said -- did not have titles. Larea simply splits the group of poems down the middle, giving the first group of poems the title of Nómina de huesos because Vallejo himself ‘había confesado algo antes a un amigo de su confianza, que algún día publicaría un libro de versos titulados así’ (p. 537). He then quotes some lines from ‘Sermón sobre la muerte’ (‘Sermón de la babarie: estos papeles; / esdrújulo retiro: este pellejo’), and concludes: ‘Obligado es, por consiguiente, titular Sermón de la barbarie los papeles que el poeta tenía entre manos’ (p. 538). It is difficult to think of a more arbitrary way of doing things. Larrea, despite the brilliance of his philological analysis in the 1974 essay, has fallen into the same trap as Georgette. They are as bad as each other, each trying to wrest from the other the authority to lay down the law.

The obvious next point to make is: where do we go from here? Based on the fact that we now know when 49 poems of the Poemas humanos were composed since their dates have been independently validated, can we come to any conclusions about the time of composition of the remaining poems of Poemas humanos, namely, the undated ones? If we accept that Georgette was right in principle if not always in terms of specifics about the undated poems of Poemas humanos, her comments are the logical first port of call. The best way to focus the argument is to concentrate on what Georgette has called Vallejo’s ‘third book of poems’. Here’s what she has to say of the period in mid-summer 1935 when Vallejo was desperately trying to get what would have been his third book of poems into print: ‘¿Qué poemas encerraba este libro de versos que hubiera venido a ser el tercer tomo de la obra poética de Vallejo? En primer lugar, bien su supone Poemas en prosa. Luego unos 25/30 poemas que Vallejo llama ‘sus nuevos versos’, más tarde parte de los futuros Poemas humanos’ (‘Apuntes biográficos’, p. 11). What I want to do, now, is use this statement as a basis for trying to work out which poems would have been in that collection. Before answering this question, though, we have to remove some of the poems from the argument about which we have more certainty as to date of composition. What follows will be tentative, but will be based on legitimate deductions.

Let’s, first of all, be clear about what can be asserted beyond reasonable doubt: Deduction no. 1 is that the dated poems of Poemas humanos were written and typed up from 4 September 1937 until 8 December 1937.

Deduction no. 2 is that these same poems were corrected by hand from January until March 1938, given that the typescript of ‘El alma que sufrió de ser su cuerpo’ shows a manuscript correction which changes ‘treinta y siete’ to ‘treinta y ocho’.
Deduction no. 3 is that the other undated poems of Poemas humanos must have been written before this period, since Vallejo died on 15 April 1938.
Observation no. 1 is that the undated poems of Poemas humanos may be split into three groups:

Poems with titles in upper case: ‘Gleba’, ‘Primavera tuberosa’ (2 poems)

Poems without title: ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina...’, ‘Parado en una piedra...’, ‘Considerando en frío...’, ‘¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona!...’, ‘Hasta el día en que vuelva...’, ‘Fue domingo en las claras orejas...’, ‘Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos...’, ‘La vida, esta vida...’, ‘Quisiera hoy ser feliz de buena gana...’, ‘De disturbio en disturbio...’, ‘¡Y si después de tántas palabras...’, ‘Por último, sin ese buen aroma sucesivo...’, ‘Pero antes de que se acabe...’ (13 poems).

Poems with titles which are mostly underlined: ‘París, Octubre 1936’, ‘Altura y pelos’, ‘Sombrero, abrigo, guantes’, ‘Salutación angélica’, ‘La rueda del hambriento’, ‘Piensan los viejos asnos’, ‘Telúrica y magnética’, ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, ‘Epístola a los transeúntes’, ‘Y no me digan nada...’ (originally had underlined title of ‘Grandeza de los trabajos vulgares’), ‘La rueda del hambriento’, ‘Los nueve monstruos’ (title not underlined), ‘Los desgraciados’ (13 poems).
Hypothesis no. 1: Poems with similar titles should be grouped together and may be assumed to have been written during a self-contained, distinct period of time. That is, if we can date just one poem in the group we may assume -- unless there are strong reasons not to do so -- that the others were written at about the same time.

A good place to start is ‘París, Octubre 1936’, since it is the only undated poem about which we have a fairly clear view as to when it was composed/typed. There is, indeed, nothing to suggest that October 1936 is not the time of composition, and, given the precedent we have seen in the sequence of dated poems (written by hand and then typed up on the same day), it seems likely to have been composed in October 1936. There is one other piece of evidence which supports the idea that the poem was written at that time, and it is the letter that Vallejo wrote to Larrea in the same month. In that letter, written on 28 October 1936 to be precise, Vallejo said the following:

Aquí trabajamos mucho y no todo lo que quisiéramos, a causa de nuestra condición de extranjeros. Y nada de esto nos satisface y querríamos volar al mismo frente de batalla. Nunca medí tanto mi pequeñez humana, como ahora. Nunca me di mas cuenta de lo poco que puede un hombre individualmente. Esto me aplasta. Desde luego, cada cual, en estos momentos, tiene asignado un papel, por muy humilde que éste sea y nuestros impulsos deben ajustarse y someterse al engranaje colectivo, según las necesidades totales de la causa. Esta consideración, no obstante, no alcanza a embridar, por momentos, nuestros arranques espontáneos. (Epistolario general, p. 262)If we look closely at the poem, though it makes no concrete reference to the Spanish Civil War as such it expresses a similar sense of futility, of disconnectedness. Here’s the first stanza:

De esto esto soy el único que parte.
De este banco me voy, de mis calzones,
de mi gran situación, de mis acciones,
de mi número hendido parte a parte,
de todo esto yo soy el único que parte.

In other words, it expresses the emotional reaction to the event rather than giving us the details about the event which caused the emotion. But as such, it is reasonable to assume that both the letter and the poem arose from a sense of anguish that Vallejo was experiencing in the month of October 1936. Whereas in the letter Vallejo expresses the desire to turn and flee and run to Spain, in the poem he simply expresses the desire to leave his present circumstances. The poem is a distillation of emotions, an expression of what it feels like to have them, whereas the letter is formulated on a mundane level. It is quite possible of course to argue that the poem has nothing to do with the letter and expresses an emotion that could have occurred at any other possible time in Vallejo’s life, but there are enough grounds -- the poem has the month 1936 in its title, and a reasonably similar frame of mind is expressed in the poem as in a letter written at about the same time -- for us to assume that there is a high likelihood that the poem was composed and typed up in October 1936.

From the logic expressed above this would mean that the other poems which have a similar looking title were also typed up at the same time. This does not seem to present a problem with the other poems except, initially, for ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, which was inspired by the sense that Vallejo had of himself as a black stone on a white stone as encapsulated by the famous photograph of Vallejo taken by Larrea. This photograph was taken in Fontainebleau in April 1926, i.e. ten years before the time we are looking at; however, Larrea says that the poem was inspired by the photograph in 1936, and we are at liberty, I believe, to assign authority to him at this point, since he was the person who took the photograph, owned it, and would -- one could surmise -- be aware of the circumstances which would lead to Vallejo writing a poem about it.

There is one other piece of evidence to suggest that this group of poems should be seen as a homogeneous whole, and that is the line ‘¿Quién no escribe una carta?’ in the poem ‘Altura y pelos’, which belongs to this group. Surely this should be seen as an allusion to Vallejo’s personal life. He had written a letter to Bergamín the year before (which I will disucss in greater detail below) but had not seen his desire fulfilled, which led him to see his letter in the wider context of unfulfilled human illusion. A mundane allusion, perhaps, but one which he then expanded to create a poem about a universally experienced emotion. As the second stanza reads:

¿Quién no escribe una carta?
¿Quién no habla de un asunto muy importante,
muriendo de costumbre y llorando de oído?
¡Yo que sólo he nacido!
¡Yo que sólo he nacido!

Vallejo’s poetry, indeed, often works on this level. Vallejo takes an ordinary, mundane situation and then he translates the emotions he feels with regard to that situation into something poetic, something earth-shatteringly true about life.

One point which should be mentioned at this juncture is that we may be seeing a pattern in the way that Vallejo wrote his poems. Is it just coincidence that we have two verifiable and concrete examples of when Vallejo was writing his poems; on one occasion during the autumn of 1937 and also during the autumn of 1936? Or is it just chance? When looking at Vallejo’s biography there seems to be a pattern of great creative endeavour in the autumn. Is it, again, just pure coincidence that he went to the Soviet Union in (almost) three successive Octobers (1928, 1929 and 1931)? I will suggest the reasons why I believe this chain of events is not coincidental. I believe there are enough grounds to suggest that a pattern is evident. Indeed, we have other complementary evidence that Vallejo was also writing up some poems during the latter part of 1935. The first piece of evidence comes from Georgette, who says the following of the summer of 1935:
Transcurre el tiempo. Estamos ya en el verano de 1935 y los poemas de Vallejo se acumulan, encajonados en el escritorio, donde aún yacen desde 1929 Poemas en prosa y sus otras obras.

-- ¿A qué escribir poemas? -- exclama un día Vallejo -- . ¿Para qué y para quién? ¿Para el cajón? Años después, leeremos en Poemas humanos: ‘y / ya no puedo con tanto cajón...’
Le opongo el caso de Valery.
- Sí -- exclama de nuevo. pero una cosa es no querer publicar, y otra no poder. A similar picture emerges from Vallejo’s correspondence. In a letter to Larrea from Paris dated Christmas day 1935 Vallejo mentioned that he had attempted to contact José Bergamín via Rafael Alberti in order to see if he would publish a collection of poems for him. This is what Vallejo wrote:
Alberti se fue hace cuatro o cinco días a Madrid. Me dijo que trataría de verte. ¿Qué es de Bergamín? A propósito, Alberti le escribió sobre mi libro publicable de versos. No sé si Bergamín recibiría esa carta, porque no ha contestado. Si le ves, haz como si no supieras nada del asunto, a ver si él te dice algo de esa carta. For a number of reasons Bergamín was, indeed, an obvious port of call during the mid-1930s. In his Cruz y Raya journal he had been publishing the work of poets such as Miguel Hernández, Luis Rosales, Leopoldo Panero, and Luis Felipe Vivanco, as well as translations of French poets such as Paul Claudel, and the printing quality of his work was of the highest standard. Perhaps of even more interest to Vallejo was the Ediciones del Árbol series which was published under the aegis of Cruz y Raya, in which a series of first-class works came out, ranging from Pedro Salinas’s Razón de amor to the first Spanish edition of Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Dennis, pp. 156-57). Perhaps most important for Vallejo, Bergamín had just brought out an edition of Alberti’s poems. In Alberti’s ‘Indice autobiográfico’ relating to that year, we read the following: ‘Breve temporada en París. Publicación en Madrid, por Cruz y Raya, la revista y editorial que dirige Jose Bergamín, de Poesía (1924-1930)’. A month later, though, and Vallejo was feeling anxious. In a letter dated 31 January 1936 to Juan Larrea, he asks him about Alberti and Bergamín, obviously trying to find out if the publication trail was leading anywhere: ‘De España no tengo noticias. Alberti se marchó hace un mes. Supongo que le habrás visto allá. ¿Y Bergamín? ¿Le has visto?’ (Epistolario general, p. 260). By the spring Vallejo was beginning to get desperate. He wrote once more to Larrea, this time on 13 March 1936:
Como no tengo respuesta de ninguna suerte de Bergamín, he pensado que quizás se perdió la carta enviada de Alberti. Te mando hoy otra para que se la entregues, tú mismo. Te la mando abierta para que la leas y luego las cierres (no te olvides). Tú puedes tambien hablarle del libro mío. Hazle entender, sobre todo, que yo desearía una respuesta, afirmativa o negativa, pero pronta. En fin, espero tus noticias. (Epistolario general, p.61)It made sense for Vallejo to attempt to use influence of other writers in order to get to Bergamín; both Alberti and Larrea had had their work published by Bergamín. Alberti recalls that an anthology of his poems came out in 1935. Larrea -- who was also asked by Vallejo to intercede on his behalf with regard to Bergamín -- was also looking to publish his own work with Bergamín. In an interview which Bergamín gave on the eve of the Spanish Civil War about future projects then entertained by Cruz y Raya, two books by Larrea were mentioned as being in press (‘y así están en prensa dos libros de Juan Larrea, uno en verso y otro en prosa’; quoted in Dennis, p. 158), but there was no reference to Vallejo. Vallejo later discovered, when he went to Spain in the summer of 1937 to attend the Second International Writers’ Congress, that his proposal had been accepted, but that the letter had not reached him. As Georgette states: ‘Finalmente, hojea sus poemas y se decide a proponerles a un editor en Madrid (posiblemente a la C.I.A.P., editora de la segunda edición de Trilce, en 1930). Serán aceptados. Pero, singular adversidad, Vallejo no recibió la contestación afirmativa del editor’ (‘Apuntes autobiográficos’, p. 11). The letter had been stolen by an aggressive landlord, according to Georgette (pp. 39-40). Although Georgette does not appear to know the name of the editor, it is likely, given that he is mentioned as based in Madrid, to have been Bergamín rather than the editor of C.I.A.P. Be that as it may, Vallejo had missed that small window of opportunity which had opened up from late 1935 until early 1936 when his poems could have been published, for, by the summer of 1936, it was too late. Franco’s invasion of southern Spain meant that things would never be the same again.
It is possible that when he went to Spain in July 1937 Vallejo received once more the offer to publish his work. This would at least explain the feverish activity that overtook him during the immediately following months -- and of which, as a result of Fló’s discovery, we now have concrete evidence for the months of September, October, November and December 1937. Indeed, Bergamín did publish Vallejo’s Civil War poems in the publishing concern he set up in Mexico. España, aparta de mí este cáliz was published in Mexico in 1940 by Séneca (see Dennis, p. 201, n. 35). But, as for the book he had originally prepared for Bergamín -- and which he described as a ‘libro publicable de versos’ -- this would not be overseen by him, since it was destined to be discovered among his papers when he died in the spring of the following year.
So we come once more back to Georgette’s pertinent question: ‘¿Qué poemas encerraba este libro de versos que hubiera venido a ser el tercer tomo de la obra poética de Vallejo?’ We need to make a few preliminary observations about this book which has been called a ‘poemario fantasma’ (Georgette de Vallejo, Allá ellos, allá ellos, allá ellos!, p. 89). Firstly, Vallejo’s collection of poems did not at that point in time have a title, which indicates that the book involved bringing together the poems he had been writing, rather than a tightly defined publication project. This is suggested by the fact that Vallejo refers to his collection of poems as ‘libro publicable de versos’ as well as ‘libro mío’. It is inconceivable to me that Vallejo would not have mentioned the title if he had thought of one, and the fact that he did not have a title, and that he had not mentioned one, is, perhaps, one of the reasons it was eventually passed over. We need to bear in mind one other circumstance. Shortly before the war broke out Bergamín had been entrusted with a manuscript against which Vallejo’s offer of a collection of manuscripts would have paled into insignificance; this was García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, which Bergamín received and then dutifully published in Mexico after the outbreak of the war, and which he then ‘mislaid’. Vallejo’s ‘libro publicable de versos’ would not, of course, have been in that league.
Based on what we now know there are a number of deductions which ought to be made. Firstly, since Larrea actually saw the letter which Vallejo sent to Bergamín -- since he was instructed to look at it before sending it on -- then it is clear that it had no title mentioned, since he would surely have remembered it. Which, as it happens, makes all of his subsequent scholarship based on creating a title for the collections of poems just sheer nonsense. Either he should have remembered the title if such a title was mentioned in the letter, or realised that it did not have a title in the first place, and therefore refrained from creating castles in the air over a period of forty odd years about the putative titles of the volumes. And indeed refrained from adding an air of legitimacy to his conjectures when he officially re-baptised Vallejo’s posthumous poetry in his 1978 Seix Barral edition, César Vallejo: poesía completa. It is logical to deduce in retrospect that these titles were not based on recollections, but were fired by the venom of his hatred for Vallejo’s widow. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the scholar at his peril ignores the process of in-fighting between Larrea and Georgette, their baptismal obsessions, smoke screens which have built up over the years, allowing us to see very little of the real Vallejo.

There is a second deduction that needs to be drawn from the above, which is as follows. If Vallejo had sent a letter to Bergamín via Alberti which was fresh in his mind when he wrote to Larrea on 25 December 1935 -- let’s say he sent it circa mid-December 1935 -- this would mean that it could not have have included any of the dated poems (i.e. those composed and then typed up from 4 September 1937 until 8 December 1937) or, indeed, more importantly, any of those poems which were composed and typed up in the autumn of 1936, namely, ‘París, Octubre 1936’, ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, as well as ‘Altura y pelos’, ‘Sombrero, abrigo, guantes’, ‘Salutación angélica’, ‘La rueda del hambriento’, ‘Piensan los viejos asnos’, ‘Telúrica y magnética’, ‘Epístola a los transeúntes’, ‘Y no me digan nada...’, and ‘La rueda del hambriento’.

So which poems did Vallejo have in mind when he referred to a ‘libro publicable de versos’? The poems which can beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt be ascribed to the pre-1935 period are: (i) the very early poems, namely, the Poemas en prosa poems which have Vallejo’s early experience in Paris written all over them, (ii) the poems published in Favorables París Poemas or Mundial in the 1920s, and (iii) some other poems which Georgette has said were inspired by Vallejo’s visits to the Soviet Union. Taken together as a group, these pre-1935 poems would be the following ones: ‘El buen sentido’, ‘La violencia de las horas’, ‘Lánguidamente su licor’, ‘El momento más grave de la vida’, ‘Nómina de huesos’, ‘Las ventanas se han estremecido’, ‘Voy a hablar de la esperanza’, ‘Hallazgo de la vida’, ‘Una mujer...’, ‘Cesa el anhelo...’, ‘No vive ya nadie...’, ‘Existe un mutilado...’, ‘Algo te identifica...’ (i.e. those from Poemas en prosa); ‘Me estoy riendo’, ‘He aquí que hoy saludo...’ (from Favorables París Poema); ‘Lomo de las sagradas escrituras’, ‘Cuatro conciencias....’, ‘Entre el dolor y el placer median tres criaturas...’, ‘En el momento en que el tenista...’ (i.e. poems which can be ascribed to the late 1920s for other reasons), as well as ‘Primavera tuberosa’ and ‘Gleba’.
These latter two poems need some individual comment. They stand out from the other poems in that they are typed in upper-case type, and that their theme is the collective nature of work, an idea which we know to have been preoccupying Vallejo in the early 1930s. Set this against Georgette’s own statement that ‘Gleba’ was inspired by Vallejo’s third trip to the Soviet Union (discussed above), and -- following our hypothesis that like-titled poems were composed at more or less the same time -- then it seems fair to assume that they were both written in c. 1931. In point of fact, these may well have been the poems that Vallejo was referring to when he said to César González Ruano in an interview published in the Heraldo de Madrid on 27 January 1931, that he was working on a collection of poems entitled Instituto central de trabajo. To quote the exchange exactly:

Para terminar, amigo Vallejo, ¿obras inéditas?
Un drama escénico: Mampar. Un nuevo libro de poesía.
- ¿Qué título?
Pues... Instituto central de trabajo.

This could of course have been a boutade designed to throw the interviewer off the trail. But as it stands it would seem to fit the description of those occasional poems which Vallejo -- according to Georgette -- wrote during his communist sympathiser period.
There is a problem with this hypothesis, however, which ought to be stated. Even if we include these last two poems and add them to the early Paris poems, this does not in itself make for a large enough collection of poems. Since there are only 21 poems in this group, and bearing in mind that Vallejo’s two previous collections had 69 and 77 poems respectively (i.e. Los heraldos negros and Trilce), this does not seem to constitute a substantial enough collection to approach a publisher with. It seems logical to deduce that Vallejo included these poems in his ‘libro publicable de versos’ as well as another group of poems, those poems which Georgette calls his ‘nuevos versos’. Since we have already excluded from consideration the group of dated poems, and the group of undated poems written and/or typed up in the autumn of 1936, then all we are left with is the remaining group of 13 untitled poems, namely: ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina...’, ‘Parado en una piedra...’, ‘Considerando en frío...’, ‘¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona!...’, ‘Hasta el día en que vuelva...’, ‘Fue domingo en las claras orejas...’, ‘Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos...’, ‘La vida, esta vida...’, ‘Quisiera hoy ser feliz de buena gana...’, ‘De disturbio en disturbio...’, ‘¡Y si después de tántas palabras...’, ‘Por último, sin ese buen aroma sucesivo...’, and ‘Pero antes de que se acabe...’. This leaves us now with 34 poems. While not a complete set of poems by Vallejo’s standards, this would be enough, perhaps, to allow the author to propose publication to a publisher, even if tentatively as a ‘libro publicable de versos’. Working from the hypothesis that an author only contacts an editor or publisher when he has just finished up a project, we may hypothesise that the poems for which we have no reasonable dates of composition may be the very ones that Vallejo had just composed and/or typed up for the Bergamín book. 34 poems is, after all, a reasonable number for an author to contact a publisher with. The fact, indeed, that the collection had no title suggests that Vallejo may have had the Alberti model in mind; remember that the Spanish poet had, that very year, published a book simply entitled Poesía (1924-1930).

If my hypothesis is correct -- and I hope that the evidence adduced and reasoning is logical enough -- then it shows just how ridiculous it was to start creating titles for the poems. Both Georgette and Larrea were, as we have seen, guilty of this. While Larrea was right in ascribing a great deal of poetic activity to Vallejo in the last six months of his life, he was wrong about the dividing-line he drew through the corpus of the posthumous poems. Likewise, while Georgette was clearly right in principle that Vallejo was writing poetry during the 1930s, she made errors when ascribing poems to particular years, as a comparison with evidence adduced by Juan Fló suggests. Based on the above, I believe we are in a position to propose a new chronology of Vallejo’s posthumous poems, as follows:
GROUP A. Early Paris poems named ‘Poemas en prosa’ in 1968 by Georgette: these poems have Vallejo’s early experience in Paris written all over them: ‘El buen sentido’, ‘La violencia de las horas’, ‘Lánguidamente su licor’, ‘El momento más grave de la vida’, ‘Nómina de huesos’, ‘Las ventanas se han estremecido’, ‘Voy a hablar de la esperanza’, ‘Hallazgo de la vida’, ‘Una mujer...’, ‘Cesa el anhelo...’, ‘No vive ya nadie...’, ‘Existe un mutilado...’, ‘Algo te identifica...’. Composed in mid- to late-1920s. (13 poems). First published in Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition.

GROUP B. Miscellaneous poems from the 1920s: the poems published in Favorables París Poemas or Mundial in the 1920s, or which can be dated by other means: ‘Me estoy riendo’, ‘He aquí que hoy saludo...’ (from Favorables París Poema); ‘Lomo de las sagradas escrituras’, ‘Cuatro conciencias....’, ‘Entre el dolor y el placer median tres criaturas...’, ‘En el momento en que el tenista...’. (6 poems). First published in Favorables París Poema, or Mundial, or Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition. GROUP C. Undated poems from ‘Poemas humanos’ (as named by Georgette) with titles in upper case: ‘Gleba’, ‘Primavera tuberosa’. These are poems which Georgette has said were inspired by Vallejo’s visits to the Soviet Union, and which can be ascribed to the early 1930s. May have been the poems Vallejo referred to when he said he was writing a collection called Instituto central de trabajo. (2 poems). First published in Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition. GROUP D. Undated poems from ‘Poemas humanos’ without title: ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina...’, ‘Parado en una piedra...’, ‘Considerando en frío...’, ‘¡Dulzura por dulzura corazona!...’, ‘Hasta el día en que vuelva...’, ‘Fue domingo en las claras orejas...’, ‘Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos...’, ‘La vida, esta vida...’, ‘Quisiera hoy ser feliz de buena gana...’, ‘De disturbio en disturbio...’, ‘¡Y si después de tántas palabras...’, ‘Por último, sin ese buen aroma sucesivo...’, ‘Pero antes de que se acabe...’ (13 poems). Probably composed and/or typed up in the autumn of 1935 in preparation for publication in Bergamín’s Cruz y Raya series, along with manuscript groups A, B & C. Project fell through. First published in Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition. GROUP E. Undated poems from ‘Poemas humanos’ with titles which are mostly underlined: ‘París, Octubre 1936’, ‘Altura y pelos’, ‘Sombrero, abrigo, guantes’, ‘Salutación angélica’, ‘La rueda del hambriento’, ‘Piensan los viejos asnos’, ‘Telúrica y magnética’, ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, ‘Epístola a los transeúntes’, ‘Y no me digan nada...’ (originally had underlined title of ‘Grandeza de los trabajos vulgares’), ‘La rueda del hambriento’, ‘Los nueve monstruos’ (title not underlined), ‘Los desgraciados’ (13 poems).

Based on an analysis of ‘Paris, Octubre 1936’, probably written and/or typed up in the autumn of 1936. First published in Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition. GROUP F. The dated ‘Poemas humanos’ poems. Definitely written and typed up from 4 September until 8 December 1937. Corrected by hand during the period January-March 1938. (49 poems). First published in Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition. GROUP G. The dated Civil War poems of ‘España, aparta de mí este cáliz’. Definitely written and typed up from 3 September until 7 November 1937. (15 poems). Published independently in three separate editions: (i) as España, aparta de mí este cáliz. Poemas (Barcelona: Ediciones Literarias del Comisariado, Ejército del Este, 1939); (ii) as a section within Georgette’s Poemas humanos (1923-1938) (1939) edition; and (iii) as España, aparta de mí este cáliz, ed. José Bergamín (Mexico City: Séneca, 1940).

This new chronology of Vallejo’s Poemas humanos seeks to differentiate between Georgette’s and Larrea’s version, and avoids positing a major fault-line, as it were, in Vallejo’s work around which all else must be positioned. Georgette sought to base her understanding of her deceased husband’s work around a dividing-line which separated the non-political from the political works, and thus she divided Poemas en prosa from Poemas humanos, and promoted the view that 1931/32 was a period in which a major paradigm-shift took place. Larrea, for his part, believed he saw a clear dividing-line in Vallejo’s work between those poems which focused on Spain and those which did not. In a sense both Georgette and Larrea were right about certain aspects of Vallejo’s life and work, but the problem grew when they attempted to impose their authority to give judgement on areas about which they had imperfect knowledge. The aim of this essay has been to use an independent piece of evidence -- the pre-typescript manuscripts unearthed by Juan Fló -- in order to create a new chronology of Vallejo’s Poemas humanos, one which takes the most reliable parts of each version to produce a new way of looking at an old problem.

Published in Modern Language Review, Volume 97, Part III (2002), pp. 602-19.