Flesh Made Word

This chapter argues that César Vallejo’s engagement with journalism is crucial for comprehending the aesthetics and politics of his Spanish Civil War poetry, although this connection is often overlooked. Reading across genres brings to light Vallejo’s commitment to self-questioning as an ethical gesture in his war poems. It illuminates the idiosyncratic, dialectical poetics he developed to unite Catholicism and Marxism, lyric and epic, and poetry and news. Beyond his poetry’s political exhortation, which has received emphasis from scholars, its graphic portrayals of the relation between war death and the production of literature dramatizes the ethical and aesthetic problems inherent in transforming soldiers’ experiences into poetic material. This chapter contends that España, aparta de mí este cáliz is a meta-rhetorical reflection on its own conditions of articulation. This chapter sets the stage for those to follow, delineating issues that also motivate other civilian poets to employ meta-rhetoric in their war writing.