Considering that Jorge Luis Borges has been world-famous for thirty years, it is curious that, in North America at least, his fame should rest almost entirely on his stories and essays. I suppose that his readers generally know that he also wrote poetry, but most of them will have read little or none of it. Since his fame is partly sustained by the academic industry that has grown up around him, it may be that his stature as a poet has been obscured by the relative indifference of academic critics to his poetry. For example, in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges (1987), a book of nearly two hundred pages comprising sixteen contributors, only John Updike devotes any attention—two of his fifteen pages—to the poems, of which, in an otherwise perceptive essay, he has nothing special to say. Borges once remarked, “I think what’s important is the way a man is moved when he reads poetry. If a man doesn’t feel poetry physically, then he doesn’t feel poetry at all. He had better become a professor or critic.” Unfortunately, most professors and critics do suffer from that deficiency, and so they are interested in ideas and in theories, not in the aesthetic experience, what Borges liked to call (using the English word) “el thrill.”

Twenty years ago, he wrote, “In the long run, perhaps, I shall stand or fall by my poems.”

Yet Borges, like Thomas Hardy, began and ended as a poet, he saw