Borges, we all know by now, is too good, and too "wrong" in his politics, ever to receive a Nobel Prize awarded in accord with Swedish Realpolitik….

Any dealing with Borges as poet must necessarily begin by admitting that the Argentinian is first of all a master of succinct prose. (p. 11)

Borges writes with great compression, but what he writes is not necessarily verse. Some of the best pages in [The Gold of the Tigers] are lists of concepts/impressions/evocations.

In his Preface to [the collection], Borges had spoken of his [admiration for] Whitman, but he had qualified his admiration for the great American: "… his careful enumeration do not always rise above a kind of crude cataloguing." Perhaps Borges' lists are less prosy than Whitman's, but still they are based on the dubious spontaneity of an imagistic and over-comprehensive imagination. His earliest list in this book is...