SOURCE: “Enumerations as Evocations: On the Use of a Device in Borges' Late Poetry,” in Borges and the Kabbalah: And Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 116–23.

In the following essay, Alazraki discusses Borges' use of the device of enumeration in his poetry.

Enumerations in literature are as old as the Old Testament, but in modern times they have achieved the status of an established rhetorical device only since the writings of Walt Whitman. Such are the conclusions of Detlev W. Schumann and Leo Spitzer, two critics who have studied enumerations in contemporary poetry. Spitzer summarized his findings in a well known essay entitled “Chaotic Enumerations in Modern Poetry.”¹ There he says: “All seems to indicate that we owe chaotic enumerations as a poetic device to Whitman.”² In a different essay devoted to Whitman, Spitzer defines the device as “consisting of lumping together things...