SOURCE: A Review of In Praise of Darkness, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXI, No. 5, April 4, 1974, p. 44.

In the following review, the unsigned critic responds to the idiosyncratic imagination of Borges's poetry in In Praise of Darkness.

Borges is the modern poet who best expresses not the power of the imagination but the seductiveness of the imaginative intellect, not one who evokes emotion raw or lyrical on the page but one who offers a highly idiosyncratic consciousness just prior to the awakening of an emotion or just after the emotion has passed. Immediacy has always been lacking in his works. And yet the world of Borges has its own majesty, its own penetrating cadences and charm, full of spheres within spheres, thought about thought, a parabolic shadow play continually unfolding, doubling back, and then returning (to use one of Borges's persistent motifs) like a river...