“New Phoenix Wings”: Jorge Luis Borges’s Sonnet “A John Keats (1795-1821)”
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This paper offers a reading of the sonnet “A John Keats (1795-1821),” by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). This sonnet was written as an homage one hundred and fifty years after the death of the last of the major British Romantics. It was published in 1972 in the book of poems El oro de los tigres. So far, when scholars have studied the relation between Borges and Keats, they have focused obliquely on the essay “El ruiseñor de Keats” by the Latin American author. In that sense, this paper concentrates on a lesser-known text that has not gotten much attention. The present reading deals with several aspects of the sonnet. First, it considers the metrical and argumentative aspects of the poem in relation to its double source—the English and the Spanish sonnet. This perspective allows for a better understanding of the formal complexity of the text. Then, the paper explores the means through which the praise of Keats is articulated. These means concern, first, syntactical and rhetorical aspects of Borges’s composition. Nevertheless, the sonnet weaves a rich net of allusions that refer not only to Keats’s works, but to texts by John Milton, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold. In this respect, the present paper explores not only the relations between the Argentinean and Keats but also the relations between Borges and the lyric in English, a topic that still awaits further study.
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References
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