SOURCE: Litvak, Lily. “José Asunción Silva (1865-1896).” In Latin American Writers, Vol. 1, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, pp. 377-85. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.

In the following essay, Litvak praises Silva's accomplishments as a Modernist poet, claiming that his skill in evoking the subtleties of the Spanish language was superb.

The author Miguel de Unamuno, in his prologue to the 1908 edition of Poesías by José Asunción Silva, commented,

How is it possible to reduce to ideas a pure poetry, one in which the words taper, thin, and fade to the point of becoming cloudlike, whirled about by the wind of sentiment and forced to kneel before the sun, which at its height whitens them and in its setting covers them in its golden aura? … To comment on Silva is like explaining the movements of Beethoven's symphonies to an audience while the...