A Poet of the “Part With No Part”

Vallejo’s poetry always felt committed to the option of politicizing human pain, that is, naming its causes and representing the effects that pain (suffering, exploitation, evil) causes in those who have been placed as the remnants of the social system. This chapter explores a poetics in which the representation of marginality becomes increasingly prominent. In Vallejo’s poetry, art names the excluded rest in order to try to produce a social change. Due to his religious formation and his Marxist readings, Vallejo began to think (and feel) that the world could be reconstituted from the place of the excluded.