During a particularly awkward interview, Jorge Luis Borges was asked whether he considered himself to be more a “writer” than a “poet.” Responding with his accustomed self-deprecating humility, Borges answered by saying that “I am a poet, absolutely. I don’t think that I am anything but a poet. I may be a clumsy poet, but I do hope that I am a poet.” These declarations might surprise most Anglophone readers of this elusive artist who identify him with the famous essays and short stories. Besides, the English translation of Borges’s Selected Poems (1972) has been long out of print. This spring, Viking will publish a more generous selection in a bilingual edition, from which the following translations are taken.

Borges was right. The distinction between “writer” and “poet” makes no sense when applied to him. All of Borges’s work —from the short stories and essays to the parables and verse—are stunning examples of the unleashed poetic imagination. Moreover, we should recall that the first three books he published in Buenos Aires during the Twenties were indeed books of verse. He published his first poem in 1919, the “Hymn to the Sea.” It begins “O sea! O myth! O wide resting place!” Not much needs to be said about this adolescent effusion except that it is written in the shadow of his then idol Walt Whitman. Borges didn’t want to imitate Walt Whitman; he wanted to be Walt Whitman, just as his future character Pierre Menard wanted to be Cervantes and write the Quixote again for the twentieth century. Much later Borges ruefully noted that “when I came across Arnold Bennett’s phrase ‘the third-rate grandiose,’ I understood at once what he meant.”

Borges was right. The distinction between “writer” and “poet” makes no sense when applied to him.

The young Borges turned himself into an experimental poet, almost a dadaist, delighting in verbal play, metaphors, the avoidance of the heroic and the pathetic. But he soon came under the influence of the classical tradition and the critical declarations of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (“Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things”). Borges could then be seen scouring bookstores in Buenos Aires, buying up copies of his vanguardist volumes in order to consign them to the flames. These three books were later reissued with the same titles in Spanish, but many poems were thrown out, and practically every line of those remaining had been revised following a more calculated poetic sensibility.

This other Borges, the meditative and profoundly metaphysical writer, is presented below. What we see here is a poet of intentional verbal penury. Typically, the poems are laconic, sober, and serene, full of intense though muted feeling. As for his earlier experimental stage, as Borges has his protagonist say in “Averroës’ Search”: “to free oneself from an error, it is best to have put it into practice beforehand.”