Selected Poems

Julio Herrera y Reissig wrote poetry that burns. Born into wealth in Montevideo, he withdrew from the world to craft verses of startling intensity, mixing Romantic longing with modernist experimentation and early surrealist dreams. He died at thirty-four, leaving behind a body of work that changed Spanish-language poetry forever. These selections, translated into English by Muna Lee and Thomas Walsh, capture his electric sensitivity: the aching desire, the moonlight melancholy, the sense that beauty is always tinged with loss. Herrera y Reissig wrote as if emotion itself were a landscape to be explored, and his language bends toward the ecstatic and the desperate in equal measure. For readers who believe poetry should feel dangerous, this collection offers verses that still feel urgent a century later. It is the work of a young man who understood that the heart's most violent storms happen quietly, in the space between what we want and what we can never have.