SOURCE: "The Conflict of Personality in César Vallejo's Poemas Humanos," in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. XLIII, No. 1, January, 1965, pp. 47-55.

In the excerpt below, Higgins discusses Vallejo's Human Poems, contending that this work demonstrates Vallejo's preoccupation with the theme of "the individual… continually at war with himself '

[Vallejo's] last and definitive book of verse, Poemas humanos, was published posthumously in 1939 and most of the poems were written in the latter years of Vallejo's life. Even the most superficial reading of this volume is enough to reveal what Guillermo de Torre [in "Reconocimiento critico de César Vallejo," Revista Iberoamericana, XXV (1960)] has called 'la propensión al desdoblamiento, al verse a si mismo como un otro'. One is struck by the number of poems in which Vallejo is engaged in dialogue with himself:

Tú surfres de una glandula endocrinica, se ve.
Y bien? Te sana el...