The 10 Best Poems by Julio Cortázar

Most people discover Julio Cortázar through his fiction — through the dizzying labyrinths of Hopscotch, through the uncanny dread of “House Taken Over,” through the cronopio stories that feel like dreams someone else had on your behalf. And then, almost by accident, they stumble into his poetry — and everything shifts. Julio Cortázar was, before anything else, a poet. His first published book was a collection of sonnets. His last major project, assembled during the final months of his life in Paris, was Salvo el crepúsculo — “Save Twilight” — a sweeping, deeply personal gathering of a lifetime’s worth of verse, interspersed with prose reflections, illustrations, and the unmistakable voice of a man taking stock of everything he had loved and lost and wondered about. Poetry was not a detour from his literary identity. It was the root from which everything else grew.

What makes Cortázar’s poems so compelling — and so different from what you might expect if you come to them from his fiction — is their directness. The surrealism is still there, and the playfulness, and the philosophical reach. But there is also something stripped and tender that his novels only occasionally allow: a man speaking plainly about love, friendship, grief, the passage of time, the strange fact of being alive and knowing it. His verse moves between formally structured sonnets and loose, breath-driven free verse; between intimate love poems and politically charged meditations on injustice; between metaphysical wondering and the most ordinary, earthly observations.

In short, Cortázar’s poetry contains multitudes — and the ten poems gathered here represent the full range of that remarkable inner world. Whether you are encountering his verse for the first time or returning to poems that have lived in you for years, what follows is an invitation to slow down, read carefully, and let one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century speak in his most unguarded register.

A Brief Portrait of Cortázar as Poet

Born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentine parents, Julio Cortázar grew up in Argentina and spent the second half of his life in Paris, where he died in 1984. He is best remembered internationally for Rayuela (Hopscotch) and his short story collections, but within the Spanish-speaking literary world, his poetry has always occupied a special place. His complete poems were published in a landmark 824-page volume by Alfaguara, curated by Andreu Jaume — a collection that confirmed what many readers already suspected: that poetry was Cortázar’s primary artistic language, the mode in which he was most himself.

His poems range from classically structured sonnets — technically accomplished, metrically precise — to sprawling free verse that reads more like charged prose. What unifies them is an emotional honesty that his fiction sometimes encases in game and labyrinth, but that the poems wear openly. Love, exile, political outrage, the terror of forgetting, the consolation of friendship, the persistence of desire — these are his great themes, and in verse he pursues them without disguise.

His only English-language poetry collection, Save Twilight, translated by Stephen Kessler and published by City Lights Books, was described by Publishers Weekly in a starred review as the work of “a people’s poet, accessible from every angle” — a characterization that captures something essential about why these poems, written in Spanish by an Argentine exile living in Paris, feel immediately intimate to readers across cultures and languages.

1. “Para Leer en Forma Interrogativa” (To Be Read in the Interrogative)

Have you seen
have you truly seen
the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze
Have you touched
really have you touched
the plate the bread the face of that woman you love so much
Have you lived
like a blow to the head
the flash the gasp the fall the flight

— Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight (trans. Stephen Kessler)

Perhaps no poem in Cortázar’s catalogue has been more widely quoted, shared, or wept over than this deceptively simple series of questions. It opens on the most fundamental sensory experiences — have you seen? have you truly seen? — and builds toward something vertiginous: the question of whether we have ever been fully present inside our own lives, or whether we have merely passed through them.

The poem proceeds by repetition and escalation, moving through seeing, touching, living, knowing — each verb repeated with the insistence of someone who suspects the answer is no. The distinction between seeing and truly seeing, touching and really touching, is Cortázar’s central preoccupation — the gap between surface encounter and genuine presence that he spent his entire creative life trying to bridge. The poem ends not with resolution but with the questions still hanging, which is precisely the point. It doesn’t tell you how to live. It asks whether you are living at all.

Clinically, this poem reads almost like a mindfulness exercise — an invitation to full sensory and emotional presence. Philosophically, it echoes the existentialist concern with authenticity. But in Cortázar’s hands, it is neither a self-help prompt nor a lecture. It is a love letter to the world, written in the interrogative mood, demanding that we answer honestly.

2. “Una Carta de Amor” (A Love Letter)

Everything I’d want from you
is finally so little
because finally it’s everything
like a dog going by, or a hill,
those meaningless things, mundane,
wheat ear and long hair and two lumps of sugar,
the smell of your body,
whatever you say about anything,
with or against me,
all that which is so little
I want from you because I love you.

— Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight (trans. Stephen Kessler)

Widely considered one of his finest poems, “A Love Letter” operates through paradox from its very first lines: wanting so little, which is to say everything. The beloved is not described through grand romantic gestures but through the debris of ordinary life — a dog going past, a hill, wheat, sugar lumps, the smell of a body. These are not diminishments. They are Cortázar’s way of saying that love lives most honestly in the unremarkable, and that what we want from the people we love is not drama but presence.

The poem continues beyond the opening stanza to invoke a love that allows freedom — a love that doesn’t possess but liberates. “May you love me with violent disregard / for tomorrow,” he writes, a line that captures the characteristic Cortázar tension between intensity and lightness, between deep feeling and a refusal of sentimental suffocation. It is one of those poems that makes you feel understood in an experience you couldn’t quite have articulated before reading it.

3. “El Futuro” (The Future)

Y yo sé bien que no estarás,
que no estarás aquí.
La calle, la noche, los pasos habituales
seguirán su camino sin tu nombre.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(And I know full well you won’t be there, / you won’t be here. / The street, the night, the habitual steps / will follow their path without your name.)

This poem begins with one of the most quietly devastating opening movements in Cortázar’s body of work: the certainty of future absence announced without drama, without ornament. The beloved is already gone before the poem begins — or gone in the speaker’s imagination, which for Cortázar amounts to the same thing. The anticipation of loss is itself a form of loss, and few poets have described that particular form of grief more precisely.

What follows is a series of images of a world continuing without the presence that made it meaningful: the street, the night, the ordinary landmarks of a shared life proceeding as if nothing had changed. Cortázar is writing about grief, or about the premonition of grief — that particular anxiety of loving something intensely enough to already mourn it. The poem is not sentimental. Its precision is what makes it devastating.

4. “Los Amigos” (Friends)

al borde de la noche se levantan
como esas voces que a lo lejos cantan
sin que se sepa qué, por el camino.

Livianamente hermanos del destino,
dióscuros, sombras pálidas, me espantan
las moscas de los hábitos, me aguantan
que siga a flote entre tanto remolino.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(at the edge of night they rise / like those voices singing in the distance / without knowing what, along the road. / Lightly brothers of destiny, / Dioscuri, pale shadows, they frighten off / the flies of habit, they keep me / afloat among so many whirlpools.)

A sonnet — and evidence that Cortázar never entirely abandoned the classical forms he mastered as a young writer. “Friends” is a tribute to the particular quality of long friendship: those people who appear, almost unbidden, at the edge of night, who hold you up not through grand gesture but through simple, persistent presence. The image of friends as “dióscuros” — the twin stars Castor and Pollux — suggests permanence, navigation, the light that orients you when everything else is uncertain.

The poem moves with the formal grace of the sonnet but carries the weight of genuine feeling. Cortázar’s friendships were by all accounts legendary, and this poem carries that biographical truth. The living, he writes, are “warm hand and shelter, / sum of what was gained and what was lost” — an image so exact and so tender that it makes you want to call someone you love.

5. “La Lenta Máquina del Desamor” (The Slow Machine of Unlove)

ya no te amo, mi amor.
Ya no te amo.
Pero cuánto te amé.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(I don’t love you anymore, my love. / I don’t love you anymore. / But how much I loved you.)

If “A Love Letter” explores the heights of love, this poem charts its dissolution with merciless precision. The title alone is extraordinary: the “slow machine of unlove” — a mechanical metaphor for the grinding, incremental process by which love doesn’t so much break as wear away, gear by gear, in silence. The poem describes two people who once inhabited each other’s skin now standing separately, no longer looking at each other with the same eyes.

The juxtaposition in those closing lines — “I don’t love you anymore, my love” — is the poem’s knife. The habit of tenderness outlasting the tenderness itself. The vocabulary of intimacy running on after the feeling has stopped. Few poems have described the end of a relationship with such compressed, almost unbearable accuracy. It is short. It does not need to be long.

6. “After Such Pleasures”

Transparente, afilada, entretejida de aire
floto en un sopor, y todavía
digo tu nombre y te despierto, angustiado.
Pero tú te obstinas en olvidarme.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(Transparent, sharpened, interwoven with air / I float in a drowse, and still / I say your name and wake you, anguished. / But you force yourself to forget me.)

Written in the melancholy that follows pleasure — the specific, philosophical sadness that arrives after intense happiness or erotic experience — this poem is Cortázar at his most psychologically precise. Its title borrows from a tradition of reflection on the hollow feeling that can follow desire’s satisfaction, and Cortázar fills that tradition with his own particular ache: the speaker, transparent and sharpened by wanting, still saying the beloved’s name into the dark.

The image of being “interwoven with air” — present but somehow dissolved — captures the particular vulnerability of the post-pleasure state with a physical accuracy that most poets miss entirely. It is a short poem that understands a great deal about the loneliness that can inhabit the closest of intimacies.

7. “Nocturno” (Nocturne)

Tengo esta noche las manos negras, el corazón sudado
como después de luchar hasta el olvido con los ciempiés del humo.
Mi mujer sube y baja una pequeña escalera
como un capitán de navío que desconfía de las estrellas.
Afuera parece como si multitudes de caballos se acercaran
a la ventana que tengo a mi espalda.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(I have black hands tonight, a sweating heart / like after fighting to oblivion with the centipedes of smoke. / My wife goes up and down a small staircase / like a ship’s captain who distrusts the stars. / Outside it seems as though multitudes of horses are approaching / the window at my back.)

One of his most purely atmospheric poems. “Nocturne” opens with the arresting image of black hands and a sweating heart — the body registering something the mind hasn’t yet named — and proceeds through a series of disconnected, late-night observations that somehow cohere into a portrait of insomnia, estrangement, and the uncanny pressure of the unconscious pressing against the ordinary world.

The final image is the poem’s most haunting: the multitudes of horses approaching the window at the speaker’s back — unseen, unfaced, felt only as presence and sound. It captures the quality of certain insomniac nights exactly: too awake, too aware, surrounded by the inexplicable strangeness of ordinary things. Cortázar himself noted in parentheses within the poem that the horses reminded him of a certain story — a rare, playful moment of self-reference that makes the poem feel even more like an overheard private thought.

8. “Ceremonia Recurrente” (Recurring Ceremony)

Dibujo de tu voz en la orilla del sueño,
arrecifes de almohada con ese olor a costa
cuando los animales echados en la cala
huelen la hierba.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(Sketch of your voice on the shore of sleep, / pillow reefs with that smell of coast / when the animals lying in the cove / smell the grass.)

A poem about the rituals of shared intimacy — sleep, the body of another person in the dark, the recurring ceremony of proximity that we perform nightly without recognizing it as the profound mystery it actually is. Cortázar’s domestic space is always haunted — not by threat but by wonder, by the uncanny richness of being alive in close proximity to another living thing.

The language here is deeply sensory — smell, sound, the textures of sleep — and moves with the slow rhythm of someone half-awake, aware of another person’s breath and warmth without being fully conscious. It treats the ordinary experience of sleeping beside someone with the reverence it deserves: as something so familiar we’ve forgotten how strange and precious it is.

9. “Tala” (Felling)

No me des tregua, no me perdones nunca.
Hostígame en la sangre, que cada cosa cruel sea tú que vuelves.
¡No me dejes dormir, no me des paz!

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo

(Don’t give me truce, never forgive me. / Harass me in the blood, let every cruel thing be you returning. / Don’t let me sleep, don’t give me peace!)

More politically and emotionally charged than the intimate love poems, “Tala” — the word means the felling of trees — uses the image of radical clearing as a metaphor for the violent urgency of real change, whether personal or political. The speaker demands to be given no rest, no comfort, no escape from the demanding presence of something — a person, an idea, a cause — that refuses to let life continue on easy terms.

This poem reflects the side of Cortázar that was deeply engaged with the Latin American political struggles of his time — his solidarity with liberation movements, his refusal to accept comfortable exile while others suffered. But it also reads as a poem about passion itself: the demand not to be allowed to settle, not to be permitted the slow death of indifference. It is fierce, urgent, and alive in every line.

10. “Happy New Year”

La sucesión de las cuatro estaciones,
el canto de los gallos, el amor de los hombres.

— Julio Cortázar, Salvo el crepúsculo (31/12/1951)

(The succession of the four seasons, / the song of roosters, the love of men.)

A poem assembled from the turnings of seasons, the crowing of roosters, the love between human beings — from the small cycles and recurring ceremonies that structure human time. Written toward the end of a year (dated 31 December 1951), it carries the quality of a man pausing to take stock: not in despair, but with the clear eyes of someone who has thought seriously about what remains worth preserving.

In Cortázar’s hands, the succession of seasons and the song of roosters are not clichés — they are genuine astonishments. The wonder that these things continue. That the world persists. That people go on loving each other through the turning of the year. Read in the context of his life’s work, assembled in Save Twilight as one of the poems closest to a farewell, this poem feels like something quietly extraordinary: gratitude without sentimentality, wonder without naivety. A wish for the reader, written in full awareness of what time takes, and what it leaves behind.

What Cortázar’s Poetry Gives Us That His Fiction Doesn’t

Reading Cortázar’s poems after knowing his fiction is a revelatory experience. The fiction is brilliant — formally adventurous, intellectually dazzling, structurally inventive in ways that changed what novels could do. But the poems are intimate in a different register. They don’t ask you to navigate a labyrinth or solve a game. They ask you to slow down and feel.

There is a directness in the best of his verse that the fiction deliberately withholds. The fear of losing love, the pain of exile, the terror of time passing and taking everything with it, the gratitude for friendship and beauty and the ordinary miracle of another person’s presence — these themes run through his novels too, but in the poems they surface without mediation. You hear the voice of a man, not the constructor of literary puzzles. And that voice, it turns out, is extraordinary.

FAQs About the Best Poems by Julio Cortázar

Did Julio Cortázar consider himself primarily a poet or a fiction writer?

By his own account, poetry came first. Cortázar’s debut publication was a collection of sonnets, and throughout his life he maintained that verse was his most essential form of expression. His complete poetry runs to over 800 pages — evidence of a lifelong, prolific engagement with the form. While his international reputation rests on his fiction, many critics and close readers consider his poetry the purest access point to his inner world. As Publishers Weekly noted in a starred review of his English-language collection, “Cortázar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso.”

Where can I read Julio Cortázar’s poems in English?

Save Twilight: Selected Poems, translated by Stephen Kessler and published by City Lights Books, remains the primary collection of Cortázar’s poetry available in English. The expanded edition includes nearly one hundred additional pages of poems, prose, and illustrations compared to the original. It selects from his 1984 Spanish collection Salvo el crepúsculo and represents the full range of his poetic voice across formal and free verse, intimate and political registers. It is widely available in bookshops and online, and is considered an essential addition to any serious reader’s library.

What are the main themes in Cortázar’s poetry?

His poetry orbits several recurring centers: love and its loss, the pain of exile and longing for Argentina, the sustaining power of deep friendship, political solidarity with Latin American struggles, the passage of time and the fear of forgetting, and the uncanny strangeness lurking inside ordinary experience. Across all of these runs a consistent preoccupation with presence and attention — the question of whether we are ever truly inside our own lives. His verse moves between classical sonnet form and free verse, between the intimately autobiographical and the broadly political, with remarkable fluency and emotional range.

Is Cortázar’s poetry suitable for readers who don’t know his fiction?

Entirely — and in some ways it is a more accessible entry point. Where the novels often demand active participation in formal experimentation, the poems ask only that you slow down and pay attention. They are emotionally direct, sensory, and deeply human in ways that cross cultural and linguistic distance easily. “To Be Read in the Interrogative” alone has introduced thousands of readers to his work who might never have opened Hopscotch. The poetry reveals the most unguarded version of Cortázar — and that version is immediately, warmly recognizable as a fully human voice.

What is “Salvo el crepúsculo” and why is it important?

Salvo el crepúsculo — “Save Twilight” — is the poetry collection Cortázar assembled during the final months of his life in Paris, published in 1984, the year he died. It represents his own selection and organization of a lifetime’s poetic work, making it an act of literary self-portraiture as much as anthology. It interweaves poems with prose commentaries, personal reflections, and illustrations — blurring genres in characteristic Cortázar fashion. Composed in full awareness of approaching death, it carries a particular emotional weight and clarity that makes it one of the most moving literary farewells of the twentieth century.

How does Cortázar’s poetry relate to his views on love?

Cortázar was married three times and wrote with great openness about the full spectrum of romantic experience — the ecstasy of new love, the comfort of lasting intimacy, the grief of its dissolution, the longing that persists after separation. His love poems are neither idealized nor cynical. They take love seriously as a philosophical and existential experience — a state in which ordinary reality is transformed and the self is genuinely altered by encounter with another. “A Love Letter,” “The Slow Machine of Unlove,” and “After Such Pleasures” together form an emotional triptych covering love’s arc with honesty, precision, and deep compassion for the human beings caught inside it.

Are there other poets similar to Cortázar worth reading?

Readers who respond to Cortázar’s emotional directness and surrealist edge often find deep connection with Pablo Neruda — particularly the Twenty Love Poems and the later Canto General. César Vallejo‘s Trilce shares Cortázar’s willingness to fracture language in the service of emotional truth. Among non-Latin American poets, Rainer Maria Rilke — particularly the Duino Elegies — resonates strongly with Cortázar’s themes of presence, loss, and the metaphysical weight of ordinary experience. And for readers drawn to the political urgency in poems like “Tala,” Ernesto Cardenal and Roque Dalton represent the fiercely committed Latin American tradition in which Cortázar was deeply rooted.