Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe - Part Four

   The Short Unhappy Life of Cesar Vallejo


    Two Spanish speaking poets were nearly contemporaries. Both led troubled lives.
    The poet and art critic Edward Lucie Smith said of the Peruvian poet Cesar Valejo, "He was Peru's greatest modernist poet." The British critic Martin Seymour Smith claimed that Vallejo was the world's greatest poet of the 20th century.
    Yet Vallejo's short life was full of problems. He was fired from a teaching job because of a love affair he had. Then he spent three months in a Peruvian prison. When he was faced with going to jail,again, he fled to Europe.
    Vallejo ended up in France where he knew many artists. Still, he endured great poverty there. He visited the Soviet Union at least three times but it's hard to know whether his left leaning politics helped or hurt him.
    In any case he died in 1938 when he was in his late 40's. He spent most  of his life just scraping by, just living on tiny amounts of money.
    Next up: Federico Garcia Lorca.