C é sar Vallejo is Yeats’s poet with the sword upstairs. Everything about him seems to burn with intensity. He burned through zarzuela Spanish, making it into a language of monosyllables, blurts, inventions, contradictions, arcane legal and medical terms. (The Mexican scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love affairs, prison, exile, expatriation, hunger and poverty, hospital, topped off by a mysterious death. (Was his ‘intestinal infection’ a recurrence of Peruvian malaria or simple Parisian starvation?) Vall

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