Between the Sonnet and the Dramatic Monologue: Borges and His Search for the Poem

Abstract

This paper considers the way in which Jorge Luis Borges approached the notion and explored the possibility of writing the “absolute poem”, i.e., a composition akin to the great classical epics, or to the attempts since Romanticism to write a text of similar stature. In the first part of this text, I offer evidence that this aspiration is present in Borges’s work since the very beginning of his career. The first technical model for such an enterprise was that of Whitman, who made use of long enumerations that tried to encompass the vastness of human experience. Borges, nevertheless, soon grew dissatisfied with such a technique and started to explore other venues. In the central part of this paper I suggest that, in some of his short stories—“El Aleph”, “La escritura del dios”, and “Undr”—he is of the opinion that such a composition should be rich in allusions rather than enumerative, and compact rather than vast, since what is transcendental does not need to be excessive. In the final part of this paper, I offer a commentary of “Él”, one of his late poems. I consider that it is one of several attempts on the part of Borges to explore the possibility of creating the aforementioned text. In it, he combines his own variations of the Shakespearean sonnet and of the English dramatic monologue in a highly allusive and intertextual composition.