SOURCE: "César Vallejo: Profile of a Poet," in Proceedings: Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, Vol. XIX, April 19-20, 1968, pp. 135-43.

In the following overview of Vallejo's poetry, McDuffie examines the thematic and stylistic features of Trilce, Black Heralds, and Human Poems, as well as Vallejo's place in twentieth-century Hispanic literature.

The poetry of César Vallejo has received increasing attention both within and without the Hispanic world since the premature death of the Peruvian mestizo poet on the eve of World War II. Now, nearly seventy-five years since his birth in a small town of the Peruvian sierra, Santiago de Chuco, and thirty years since his untimely death on Good Friday of 1938 in Paris, his reputation continues to grow. Evidence of his international stature is the fact that he has attracted the attention of critics writing in Italian, Portuguese, German, English, Swedish, Hebrew, Russian and French...