Vicente Aleixandre

Spanish poet, Nobel laureate, and member of the Generation of ’27.

• Born: April 26, 1898
• Place of birth: Seville, Spain
• Died: December 14, 1984
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Biography

Vicente Aleixandre was a prominent member of the Generation of ’27, a group of avant-garde Spanish poets that also included Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, and Dámaso Alonso, among others. Aleixandre was born in Seville but spent his childhood in the Mediterranean city of Málaga, which he would later, in Sombra del paraíso (1944; Shadow of Paradise, 1987), recall as the “City of Paradise.” He studied law in Málaga and in Madrid, but delicate health, which was to afflict him for all his adult life, soon interrupted his legal career and encouraged him to devote himself fully to poetry.

His first poems appeared in Revista de Occidente (Journal of the West), the prestigious journal edited by José Ortega y Gasset. Like others of the Generation of ’27—a reference to the year in which his generation rallied around the tercentenary of death of their idol, Luis de Góngora—Aleixandre began writing poetry that embraced the post-symbolism line of “pure poetry.” This movement took as its points of departure the baroque Góngora and the postmodernist Juan Ramón Jiménez. Ámbito (Scope, 1928) was created out of this juncture, but soon after Aleixandre broke radically with the pure poetry style, which some had begun to consider intellectually exquisite but too cerebral and dry. Instead his work began to show some of the looser influences of surrealism. In Spain Aleixandre’s hermetic, dreamlike poems in prose, Pasión de la tierra (Passion of the earth, 1935), written “with a minimum of elaboration,” came closest to the surrealist automatic texts. Later the poet came to recognize this as his most difficult work. He saw the evolution of his poetry, starting with the raw materials of his early work, as “a longing for the light.” It was a long process, in part because his aesthetics were complicated by the climate of Spain’s social unrest, which culminated in the Spanish Civil War and its long aftermath. Aleixandre’s next two volumes, Espadas como labios (Swords like lips, 1932) and La destrucción o el amor (1935; Destruction or Love, 2000), were his first attempts to express the same volcanic, visionary, though admittedly negative, inspiration in verse. Despite the success of La destrucción o el amor, which won the Spanish National Literary Prize, Aleixandre’s attempts to publish the more hermetic, prosaic Pasión de la tierra in Spain failed, prompting him to publish it in Mexico in 1935.

The outbreak of the war and his own poor health trapped Aleixandre in Spain during the war. His house was almost completely destroyed in the bombing; among the few items he could recover was an autographed book by Federico García Lorca. Aleixandre remained in Spain after the collapse of the republic, but for years his works were banned by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. He captured some of his despair during this tragic period of Spanish history in Mundo a solas (1950; World Alone, 1982), written between 1934 and 1936 though not published until later, in which he cries out that “man doesn’t exist. He has never existed, never.” The destruction wrought by the war underlay his writing of Sombra del paraíso between 1939 and 1943. Childhood memories, the immortal elements, and glimpses of the earthly paradise before the birth of humankind represent the only consolations for the suffering poet. The publication in 1944 of Sombra del paraíso, which is generally considered one of Aleixandre’s best works, and of Dámaso Alonso’s Hijos de la ira (Children of Wrath, 1970) marked the rebirth of poetry in postwar Spain.

Also in 1944 Aleixandre published the second edition of La destrucción o el amor, which contained an important new foreword in which he traces the evolution of his poetry up to that point and opens up a new cycle of his writing. He declares that whereas some poets only write for the few—“attending to exquisite and narrow obsessions”—other poets “address themselves to what is permanent in man, to what essentially unites.” According to Aleixandre these are “radical poets speaking to what is primordial, to what is elemental in humanity.” Historia del corazón (History of the heart, 1954), written between 1945 and 1953 and published the following year, represents the high point in this new cycle of Aleixandre’s poetry. In 1949 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española.

Historia del corazón began as a love diary in verse but eventually transcended this first impulse. In some poems erotic love is sublimated into human solidarity; others evoke different stages of life or focus on the existential predicament. Here the nightmarish, repulsive visions of the earlier cycle are replaced by images of everyday life. The poet leaves his enclosure and enters the public square, the heart of social life of every Spanish city, and invites his implicit interlocutor, the reader, to do the same.

In Los encuentros (The encounters, 1958) Aleixandre offers lively portraits of twentieth-century Spanish writers. Poemas de la consumación (Poems of consummation, 1968) and Diálogos del conocimiento (Dialogues of knowledge, 1974) are the poetic endgames of a grand old poet, who was nearly unknown outside Spain until he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of his Generation of ’27.

Author Works

Poetry:

Ámbito, 1928, revised 1950

Espadas como labios, 1932

Pasión de la tierra: Poemas, 1928–1929, 1935

La destrucción o el amor, 1935, revised 1944 (Destruction or Love, 2000)

Sombra del paraíso, 1944 (Shadow of Paradise, 1987)

Mundo a solas, 1934–1936, 1950 (World Alone, 1982)

Poemas paradisíacos, 1952

Nacimiento último, 1953

Historia del corazón, 1954

Mis poemas mejores, 1956

Poesías completas, 1960

Poemas amorosos: Antologías, 1960, enlarged 1970

Antigua casa madrileña, 1961

Picasso, 1961

En un vasto dominio, 1962

Prescencias, 1965

Retratos con nombre, 1965

Dos vidas, 1967

Poemas de la consumación, 1968

Antología del mar y de la noche, 1971 (Javier Lostalé, editor)

Poesía superrealista, 1971 (partial translation, The Cave of Night, 1976)

Sonido de la guerra, 1972

Diálogos del conocimiento, 1974

Antología total, 1975 (Pere Gimferrer, editor)

The Caves of Night: Poems, 1976

Antología poetíca, 1977 (Leopoldo de Luis, editor)

Twenty Poems, 1977 (Lewis Hyde and Robert Bly, translators)

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, 1979 (Lewis Hyde, translator)

A Bird of Paper: Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, 1981 (Willis Barnstone and David Garrison, translators)

The Crackling Sun: Selected Poems, 1981 (Louis Bourne, translator)

Vicente Aleixandre para niños, 1984 (Leopoldo de Luis, editor)

Nuevos poémas varios, 1987 (Irma Emiliozzi and Alejandro Duque Amusco, editors)

Lo mejor de Vicente Aleixandre: Antología total, 1989 (Pere Gimferrer, editor)

En gran noche: Últimos poemas, 1991 (Carlos Bousoño and Alejandro Duque Amusco, editors)

Miré los muros, 1991 (Mario Hernandez and Driss El-Fakhour, editors)

Poesías completas, 2001 (Alejandro Duque Amusco, editor)

Antología de la poesía oral traumática, cósmica y tanática de Vicente Aleixandre, 2005 (Fredo Arias de la Canal, editor)

Nonfiction:

Vida del poeta: El amor y la poesía, 1950

Algunos caracteres de la nueva poesía española, 1955

Los encuentros, 1958

Epistolario, 1986 (correspondence; José Luis Cano, editor)

Prosas recobradas, 1987 (Alejandro Duque Amusco, editor)

Prosas completas, 2002 (Alejandro Duque Amusco, editor)

Cartas de Vicente Aleixandre a José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, 2005 (correspondence; Irma Emiliozzi, editor)

Miscellaneous:

Obras completas, 1966, revised 1977–78 in 2 volumes (Carlos Bousoño, editor)

Bibliography

Cabrera, Vicente, and Harriet Boyer, editors. Critical Views on Vicente Aleixandre’s Poetry. Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1979. Criticism and interpretation of Aleixandre’s addresses, essays, lectures, and poetry. Includes selected poems in English translation.

Daydí-Tolson, Santiago, editor. Vicente Aleixandre: A Critical Appraisal. Bilingual Press, 1981. A critical study of Aleixandre’s work with a biographical introduction, extensively annotated bibliography, index, and Aleixandre’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture.

Harris, Derek. Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre. La Sirena, 1998. History and criticism of surrealism in Spanish literature, including the works of Aleixandre. Includes bibliography.

Harris, Derek. “Spanish Surrealism: The Case of Vicente Aleixandre and Rafael Alberti.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 1982, pp. 159–71. Discusses surrealism in Aleixandre’s work.

Ilie, Paul. The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature: An Interpretation of Basic Trends from Post-Romanticism to the Spanish Vanguard. U of Michigan P, 1968. A study of surrealism in Spanish literature. Includes bibliographic references.

Murphy, Daniel. Vicente Aleixandre’s Stream of Lyric Consciousness. Bucknell UP, 2001. Criticism and interpretation of Aleixandre’s poetics, with bibliographical citations and index.

Schwartz, Kessel. Vicente Aleixandre. Twayne Publishers, 1970. An introductory biography and critical analysis of selected works by Aleixandre.