Which Peruvian poet wrote 'Los heraldos negros'?

César Vallejo wrote the poetry collection Los heraldos negros.

The Peruvian poet composed the poems mainly between 1915 and 1918, and the book was published in Lima in July 1919. It was Vallejo’s first published volume. The opening poem shares the collection’s title, making “Los heraldos negros” both the name of the book and one of its best-known poems.

The collection reflects Vallejo’s transition from Spanish American Modernismo toward a highly personal poetic voice. Its poems confront suffering, death, religious doubt, guilt, loneliness, fate, and the feeling of human abandonment. Vallejo also draws on Peruvian landscapes, memories, and cultural experience, though the book’s emotional concerns are universal.

Readers sometimes confuse the author with José Santos Chocano, another major Peruvian poet associated with the literary context Vallejo inherited. Chocano influenced the era’s poetic environment, but Los heraldos negros belongs specifically to Vallejo. The book’s delayed publication also explains why some references give 1918, its intended publication date, while others give 1919, the actual publication year.