McGrady, Donald. “Two Unknown Poems by José Asunción Silva.” MLN 81, no. 2 (March 1966): 233-37.

In the following essay, McGrady reviews two previously undiscovered poems by Silva, first printed in the Bogotá newspaper Gil Blas upon the sixteenth anniversary of Silva's death.

The works of José Asunción Silva are only partially and imperfectly known. Silva published a small portion of his total production during his lifetime, and most of his extant poems were published posthumously by friends or descendants. These friends and relatives did not always respect the poet's work, but frequently retouched those passages that they considered unsuitable. Sometimes the changes reflect the prudery of the self-appointed censor;¹ in other cases the editor merely seems to have preferred a different word, occasionally introducing another grammatical form.² Furthermore, according to one critic,³ some poems were reconstructed by those who had been present at the readings Silva held for...