“Musa callejera”: historia de un corpus inestable

Literary critics have paid little attention to the textual history of Guillermo Prieto’s “Musa callejera”. When spoken of, his work is thought of as monolithic, whose only antecedent was Filomeno Mata’s 1883 edition, legitimized by the 1971 reprint that Francisco Monterde made for Porrúa publishing house. However, the structure of its textual history reveals three main facts which may modify the vision of Guillermo Prieto’s works: on one hand, that his very first book of poems, Versos inéditos, which completely propounds its own poetics, has been hidden in the author’s work; on the other hand, that Filomeno Mata’s “Musa callejera” is actually an anthology of Prieto’s poems, and finally, that “Musa callejera” is a literary project that the author continued until a few years before his death.