SOURCE: "The Greater Voice: On the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges," in Prose for Borges, edited by Charles Newman and Mary Kinzie, Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 256-66.

In the following essay, Murchison argues that Borges's poetic voice is at once humble and intended to be the voice of the eternal creator.

Not much has been written about Borges' poetry in Spanish, and still less in English. [This article was written for publication in 1970. Since then, of course, Seymour Lawrence has brought out a splendid edition, Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems 1923-1969 (New York, 1971), to which I refer the reader.] Borges himself has done a fair job of belittling his own production, dismissing most of it with a sad, slightly contemptuous gesture; but it is this very depreciation that illuminates certain aspects of his poetry. We cannot, after all, lightly gloss over Borges' poetic production; that privilege may be...