Jorge Luis Borges
Quick answer: How Jorge Luis Borges built poems from mirrors, chess and time: a craft guide to his forms, catalogues and quiet turns, with advice for your own work.
The world knows Jorge Luis Borges for his labyrinthine short stories, but he began as a poet in 1923 and ended as one, and he always said poetry was the senior art. Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, he caught the avant-garde fever of ultraísmo in Spain as a young man, then spent the rest of his life walking away from it, back toward rhyme, metre and the plain magic of old forms.
Blindness, which closed over him in the 1950s just as he became director of Argentina's National Library, pushed him further toward traditional verse: sonnets and rhymed quatrains could be composed and revised entirely in his head. The result is a body of poems that make metaphysics feel domestic, and domestic objects feel eternal.
From rebel to classicist
Borges's first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), mapped his native city in free verse at dusk. The mature poems, gathered in volumes such as El hacedor (1960) and El otro, el mismo (1964), prefer the eleven-syllable line and the sonnet, handled with conversational ease.
He matters to poets for a specific reason: he shows that ideas can be the subject of lyric poetry without the poem turning into an essay. Time, identity, infinity and memory arrive in his verse wearing the clothes of ordinary nouns.
Signature moves
Borges's craft habits are consistent enough to name and imitate.
What you can learn from him
Choose one object from your daily life and ask what large idea it secretly hosts. A bus ticket holds contingency; a mirror holds the double. Write the object faithfully and let the idea arrive uninvited.
Practise the flawed list: draft a catalogue poem of ten items where nine belong to one category and the tenth breaks it, placed about two-thirds through. And if you write free verse only, try one quiet sonnet. Borges's example suggests form is not a cage but a mnemonic, a way for a poem to remember itself.
Where to start reading
Begin with El hacedor (1960), a slim mixture of prose and verse. Then read the widely anthologised poems: 'Poema de los dones' on the gift of books and blindness, 'Ajedrez' on chess and fate, 'El Golem' on making and language, and 'Límites' on last times. Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) shows where it all started, and the late collection La rosa profunda (1975) shows the blind master at full ease.
What poets can take from this
- Give every abstraction a physical host object before you draft.
- Build a list poem and break its category once, deliberately.
- Keep rhymed poems conversational; let the form do the singing.
- Delay the first-person pronoun until the poem's final movement.
- Reread your city as if it were a library of symbols.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about an ordinary object you have owned for years, treating it as proof of a philosophical idea you half believe. Do not name the idea until the last two lines, if at all.
Questions
Was Borges a poet or a story writer first?
A poet first. His debut, Fervor de Buenos Aires, appeared in 1923, years before his famous stories, and he returned almost entirely to poetry in his later decades, partly because blindness favoured composing verse from memory.
Which Borges poems should a beginner read first?
Start with 'Poema de los dones', 'Ajedrez' and 'Límites'. They show his three core moves: the personal turn, the object as idea, and the quiet meditation on time.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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