SOURCE: "The 'Secret Complexity' of Jorge Luis Borges's Poetry," in The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered Poets in Latin America, Bucknell University Press, 1996, pp. 125-38.

In the following essay, Running studies the "secret complexity " of Borges's poetry, which arises from the poet's awareness of the ambiguity of language and of human experience.

Ever since the final years of the Ultraist decade of the twenties in Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986) tried to undo or to discredit almost everything that he believed or wrote during those years. This purposeful rejection of what was, after all, a synthetic approach to art, a catchall of avant-garde theory and practice, led him into new areas of literary investigation that placed him once again paradoxically in the forefront of current theoretical development. In fact, Borges is now commonly mentioned in the same breath with some of the leading poststructuralist theoreticians...