[Vallejo, César (1892 - 1938)] Miller, Dan. (b. 1928)
César Vallejo
Attractive original wooden block for a woodcut portrait of the influential modernist Peruvian poet. 15-1/2 x 11 inches; light wear. Undated. Titled and signed by the artist in pencil on the right edge.The Poetry of César Vallejo is unparalleled in movingly capturing the dislocation and frustrated passion of the early twentieth century. He lived in a world that was violently breaking and being born, and he depicts—in his masterpiece Trilce and in his posthumous poems—the shapes reality makes when molded to the contours of an individual consciousness. One of the earliest and most consistently underrepresented of what we today call the modernists, Trilce was published in the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, but it was published by an unknown writer in Peru and so wasn’t available in Europe or the U.S.. Although its author later moved to Paris, where he got along well with both Lorca and Neruda and continued to write brilliant poetry, he would not publish another book of poems in his lifetime. Most of his poetry trickled into publication after he died in 1938, and English readers would not have easy access to his work until decades later. (4827)
Art/Sculpture Literature