SOURCE: A review of In Praise of Darkness, in The New York Times Book Review, Section 7, August 11, 1974, pp. 6-7.

In the following review, Barnstone offers a positive assessment of In Praise of Darkness.

Like Miguel de Cervantes, about whom he often writes, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges sees himself primarily as a poet. But Cervantes's quixotic notion of being a great poet was wrong, for the Spaniard's verses are largely mannered imitations in the Italian style and meter of the other Golden Age poets. Conversely, Borges, known largely for his ficciones, has now published his fifth volume of poems [titled In Praise of Darkness], a unified sequence of profound observations about people and things, dreams and darkness, showing that Borges, in giving primacy to poetry, is right. Yet with typical shiftiness, Borges also claims there is really no difference between his ficciones and his poems, that anyway he...