SOURCE: Roberts, Jack. “Life and Death in the Poetry of José Asunción Silva.” The Southern Quarterly 10, no. 2 (January 1972): 137-65.

In the following essay, Roberts examines the pessimism and sense of futility that characterized Silva's life and work, pointing to the influence of Comte and Schopenhauer on his poetry.

When any man takes his life, it is a tragic event, but if that man happens to be a promising literary figure, the public seems particularly shocked, and, doubtless, many wonder what could have compelled him to such a choice. José Asunción Silva is usually considered the most pessimistic of the modernists. There is within his work a deep melancholy, a sense of helplessness, a lack of purpose, a feeling of anxiety and desperation unequalled in modernist poetry. A suicide at the age of thirty, Silva apparently either could not cope with his particular circumstances in life or...