SOURCE: “Texts and Intertexts in Jorge Guillén's Homenaje,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. 370-82.

          “En qué se diferencian de
los comentarios los que no
                                                                      lo son”

Unamuno, Cómo se hace una novela 47

Homenaje (reunión de vidas)—Jorge Guillén's “poetic daybook”—contains a cornucopia of responses to a lifetime of browsing in world literature. Through hundreds of poems inspired by extensive readings of poetry and prose in several languages, Guillén has not only left a record of his tastes and interests, which were catholic and considerable, but has also provided, in the peculiar tandem of the reading and writing self that characterizes Homenaje, an unusual opportunity to observe the means by which a strong and singleminded poet reads to refute and affirm the texts of other poets as well as his own. “Escuchando,” in Quevedo's marvelous phrase, “con los ojos” to the quick and the dead and reacting by means of glosses and translations, he transmuted his readings into poetry. Unlike Keats, who turned to only a few bards to feed his “delighted fancy,” Guillén read widely in ancient and modern literature, and with an especially keen eye in the works of such peers as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and Lorca.¹

The extent of the intertextual character of Homenaje becomes clear when one realizes that of 484 poems, 239 are evident glosses or translations. This figure does not take into account the many poems without titles or epigraphs (the latter Guillén's favorite way of signaling the presence of another poet) that are written around indirect allusions.

For its author Homenaje was an effort to integrate himself and his poetry with Europe. Although Guillén was a member of the Europe-oriented Generation of '27, he came of age in a country that still echoed with the anti-European polemics of the Generation of '98 and saw them chillingly revived in the time of Franco. He began his famous poem, Cántico, in Brittany, as a young poet who had lived in Paris and taught at Oxford. Like Ortega, he saw Spain in terms of integration with Europe, or, as he wrote apropos of Homenaje to his Italian critic Oreste Macrí: “España en su historia, en su Europa” (410).

In addition to showing the poet as a reader of the texts of others, Homenaje affords a glimpse into another aspect of the entwined reading and writing selves, for a significant portion of the book is written in response to his own Cántico, first published in 1928. In his declining years, he continuously glossed, reaffirmed, and savored one of the great hymns to the earth in twentieth-century poetry. “Al margen de un cántico,” dedicated to Octavio Paz, is typical of the many cases in which Guillén repeats his discovery of the world as irreducible and beloved: “El mundo importa. Rodea, / Vivo con él …” (124). Such a method of glossing one's past texts and voices contrasts sharply with the practice of Guillén's distinguished peer Juan Ramón Jiménez. Like Mallarmé, Jiménez did not believe in closure, and, by a process of rewriting he dubbed “reliving,” tampered extensively with his masterpieces and turned them into “new” poems that, were they to be preferred to the original versions, would establish a work with different and not necessarily more appealing characteristics than those now considered canonical.² But Guillén, after polishing Cántico in its successive editions, was content to reaffirm the principal tenets of his great obra by means of supplementary poems that sustain the original.

Homenaje, then, is a text clearly dependent on its antecedents. Its web of past readings and writings invites intertextual analysis in the strict sense: one text is demonstrably present in another.³ The book was written over nearly a score of years (1949-66), and includes discussions with himself that are a form of self-glossing, in which he repeats themes and tropes. (The lovers who appear at the erotic center of Homenaje play out their passions through essentially the same images that defined the theme in Cántico.) The struggle with other writers is equally protracted; the argument with Quevedo, as we shall see, goes back at least to Cántico.

Organization can also be a form of intertextuality, and Homenaje displays a fondness for architectonics, espousing the models of previous Guillén texts. The sense in Cántico of a painstakingly constructed movement toward an apex becomes in Homenaje first a centripetal urge, a curvilinear movement from the rim to the center, and then centrifugally reversed. The book's six sections plot this motion. The title of Part 1, “Al margen,” suggests its site on the edge, and announces that its unifying procedure will be the presentation of marginalia.⁴ The section begins with a gloss on Genesis 1:22 (“y multiplíquense las aves sobre la tierra,” 15) and, after setting in verse reactions to 96 writers, concludes with the piquant self-gloss “Al margen de un cántico” (124).

The peculiar bestowing of attention implicated in the act of writing marginalia carries over to the title of Part 2, “Atenciones,” in which the epigraph, couched in terms familiar to Guillén's readers, declares that attention is a way of paying homage to people and things of the world. Sections I and IV contain poems inspired by twelve Spanish language authors, including Guillén himself (“Eso basta,” 139). Many of the poems, notably a long portrait of Salinas (204-09), evoke the presence of poets who were Guillén's contemporaries. “Antonio Machado,” dedicated to Oreste Macrí, offers an example of Guillén's talent for encapsulating character:

Con lentitud de soñador andante,
Ya precozmente viejo,
Aquel hombre pasea por caminos
De sol y polvo y luna.
¿Talante derrotado
Sirve para arquetipo?

(142)

In nearly every case, Guillén's strong sense of friendship and prevailing generosity of spirit set the tone. The serventesio written in 1958, a month after the death of Juan Ramón Jiménez, manages to summarize, salute, and still not pass over blemishes. The epigraph reads “Junto al monte Parnaso.”

Amó, se apasionó, maldijo. Pura
Belleza contemplaba, solo, dios.
Unico, le asombraba ser ya dos.
Fin: su gloria a este monte da hermosura

(145).

Words and the flesh in a wedding with the world: such themes tend to be the axis of any Guillén book, and indeed Eros forms the epicenter of Homenaje. Part 3, “El centro,” begins with “Candelabro,” a poem about naming (and hence, as Grant MacCurdy [152-56] has observed, a metapoem) and then introduces in “Amor a Silvia” the celebration of a love relationship remarkable for its delicacy, intensity, and eroticism.

In Part 4, the motion becomes centrifugal; “Alrededor” follows “El centro” and themes turn historical—“Se necesita en Dallas / Otro Mingo Revulgo” (331)—and personal: “¡Qué cansado estoy, Dios mío, / Qué cansado estoy!” (377). Glossing continues to be the preferred procedure. The “Variaciones” of Part 5 are translations and imitations of a wide range of poets, a full-fledged form of attention and homage. The “Fin” of Part 6 reflects a preoccupation with personal time, responses to old stereotypes (“Los poetas profesores” 498), a cry against cremation—a form of “suicidio póstumo” (526), and the famous announcement “la obra está completa” (595). (This last, of course, turned out to be premature, because the poet's continued sojourn in the world meant further attentions, homages, and marginalia.)

Upon closer analysis, the symmetrical structure just described does not, however, parallel the delicate inner balance that characterizes Cántico. In the words of Ignacio Part (192), Homenaje is the most relaxed section of Guillén's obra, depending as it does on the opportuneness of readings. The order in which attention is paid to other authors has about it the haphazardness of the everyday.

In its homage⁵ to authors past and present, Homenaje runs reading and writing together to such an extent that distinction between them becomes difficult. Nearly every poem offers an explicit invitation to other texts, by means of direct allusion and epigraph. The reader is constantly challenged to think of palimpsests, and the affirmation and denial peculiar to juxtaposition. Barbara Johnson's understanding of intertextuality as “the multitude of ways a text has of not being self-contained” (264) applies to Homenaje with the difference that the otherness can generally be apprehended without recourse to self-conscious word play. Guillén clearly indicates the direction to readers curious enough to follow.

In the welter of titles, epigrams, direct and indirect allusions, two broad tendencies in Guillén's reading can be isolated: affirmation and denial. In most cases, the translations fall under the former category and offer an opportunity to observe a strong poet translating with the kind of force majeure inherent in his other poems.

The prevailing note of cordiality, of the gathering of kindred spirits—“amigos … por gracia / De lectura” (47)—in Homenaje should not cloud the fact that Guillén is reading to affirm and refute. His chief purposes are to pay his respects and render his admiration to those whose vision of the cosmos coincides with his, and to reject outright, subdue with his glosses, those whose pessimism runs counter to his optimism. The brief poem “Resumen” is instructive in this regard:

Me moriré, lo sé, Quevedo insoportable.
          No me tiendas eléctrico tu cable.
Amé, gocé, sufrí, compuse. Más no pido.
          En suma: que me quiten lo vivido.

The poem continues Guillén's long struggle with Quevedo's celebrated sonnet series on the brevity of life.

As a conclusion to the first complete version of Cántico, Guillén appended Quevedo's dire question “¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?” (All of Cántico, of course, is a response on behalf of la vida to Quevedo's baroque pessimism.) Clamor (1957-1963) carried forward the attack on Quevedo. “Ars vivendi” (516) concludes with “Serán [estas horas] mis sucesiones de viviente,” a direct confrontation with Quevedo's well-known description of fleeting hours as “Presentes sucesiones de difunto,” which served Guillén as an epigraph. Quevedo is not only part of Cántico's frame, he is constantly contradicted in other works, thus testifying to the protracted nature as well as the depth of Guillén's mano a mano with his seventeenth-century compatriot.

It is only natural, then, that Guillén should continue to grapple with Quevedo in Homenaje. Quevedo is insoportable because his picture of the human condition awash in tears, bound to bodily needs, as an aimless succession of scenes between diaper and winding sheet, is an obstacle to Guillén's desire to write a hymn to this world. But Quevedo's “unbearableness” derives also from his talent: thus Guillén's testy first line. Quevedo in battered old age asserted the preponderance of memory over action in the lapidary phrase “Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido,” which Guillén turns into “… que me quiten lo vivido”—a homily, to be sure, but also a summary of his attitude toward life.

The tendency to meet a thesis head on with its antithesis is characteristic of Guillén's earliest reactions to other authors' texts. His life-affirming zeal (“¡Afirmación, que es hambre,” Cántico 258) leads him to contradict the large band of nay-sayers that have appeared since the Copernican revolution. When Dámaso Alonso sent him a copy of Oscura noticia (1944), poems born of the dark days of the Franco dictatorship, Guillén replied with a décima entitled “Clara noticia” (Cántico 243), both a compliment and a contradiction. Thus it is no surprise to find in “Al margen de Mallarmé” such an antithetical response as “Ah, la carne no es triste, no leí todo libro” (Homenaje 91)

The confrontation with Baudelaire could not be more loaded with contraries. Baudelaire's fierce need to demythify Cythera as an “Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons” leads him to an opposing myth, symbolized by the gallows where he witnesses his own hanging corpse. The concluding prayer for fortitude—“Ah! Seigneur! donnezmoi la force et le courage / De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!”—is picked up by Guillén in his gloss “Citeres” (373). For Guillén, “Van a Citeres sólo quienes ante / Sí ya sus propias islas ven” in order to explore the eternal adventure of love, whose presence is swollen with epiphanies, not corpses—“De un henchido presente sin poso.” Guillén's final prayer ironically, almost sarcastically counters Baudelaire: “Da, Señor, al amor la valentía / De contemplar, feliz, el cuerpo amado.”

Confrontation sometimes produces a more thoughtful response. “La gran aventura,” with its indirect allusions to Unamuno's “Salmo 1” (Poesía completa 108) and to Juan Ramón Jiménez's Animal de fondo makes a more nuanced appropriation of other texts:

Es Dios quien al hombre crea,
O el hombre quien crea a Dios.
Alguien desde una platea
Pregunta: ¿Cuál de estas dos
Creaciones ideales
Más sería maravilla?
—Mucho en ambos casos vales,
Hombre, centella de arcilla.
O tu origen es divino,
Y hay barca, remero y remos,
O Dios en tu mente advino.
Siempre hay creación. La vemos.
¿Que nuestra inquietud perdura?
La Tierra es gran aventura.

(303)

Unamuno's anguished cry in “Salmo 1” (“¿Tú, Señor, nos hiciste / para que a Ti te hagamos, / o es que te hacemos / para que Tú nos hagas?”) and Jiménez's exultant discovery of a symbiotic god of consciousness hover in the background of Guillén's calm first stanza. Ironic distance touches the word platea, the theater box, from whence a perhaps bemused spectator can make the point that creation (either the biblical or the humanist) is a maravilla, the great adventure, the bringer of the good fortune that is life. The confrontation takes place through the use of other texts. The line “O Dios en tu mente advino” recalls Jiménez's “tú has venido a el” (Animal 66) where tú refers to the dios deseado y deseante and él to the world created by the poet for his god. Guillén skillfully places himself outside the concerns of Unamuno and Jiménez. Although his disagreement is fundamental, the argument reveals more texture, and its pursuit becomes more rewarding than a mere series of direct denials.

On occasion, Guillén's gloss strengthens a weak poem. Andrew Debicki (274) has shown how the reworking of Enrique Gil in “Las violetas” (81) is done through the voice of a protagonist less rhetorical and less prone to sentimentality. Debicki also reminds us of the challenge basic to intertextuality, for, as he notes, our reading of the Guillén poem cannot take on any real significance until we grasp its relation to the Gil text.

Curtius insisted that the highest tribute one author could pay another was translation, and this note prevails in the section of Homenaje entitled “Variaciones.” The range of tastes in poets translated is predictably wide, running from Tasso to Montale, including friends (the French hispanist Jean Cassou, whose poetry will be lucky to reach the lowest slopes of Parnassus), and overlooking Eliot (but not Pound).

Translation without a specific audience in mind seems unusually disinterested. Although Guillén earned an accolade as Valéry's translator after the 1930 appearance of his excellent Spanish version of “Le Cimitière marin,” reprinted in Homenaje 416-422, in his translation of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” he reveals no desire to be known as a translator of Yeats. Nor is there any particular missionary urge to make the poetry of Yeats known to a wider audience—or to bring out a Spanish version of “Tintern Abbey,” although Wordsworth is not often translated into Spanish. Guillén is drawn to these poems by Yeats and Wordsworth by sentiments in tune with his own profound feelings about nature. Especially in the lines of Wordsworth's famous poem he would have felt himself a kindred spirit to the “power / Of harmony” (harmonía is a motif of his work) and the “blessed mood” (which Guillén translates as “trance beato,” 390) that allow him to join with Wordsworth and say “We see into the life of things” (“Contemplamos la vida de las cosas,” 391). Poems such as these want no gloss, but instead deserve that unique form of intimacy that is translation.

Appropriating Robert Lowell's solution for the vexing difficulty of turning poetry into another language, Guillén in a reading at Harvard preferred to call his efforts “imitations.” While the quality is uneven, there is, as Lowell said about his own imitations, the virtue of “one voice running through many personalities, contrasts, and repetitions” (xi). Macrí (439) has rightly called Guillén's practice of translation “adherentísima” and “escrupulosísima.” Frequently Guillén makes no effort to approximate felicities of alliteration in the original language. Yeats's “bee-loud glade” gets extended and subdued into the line “Y en el claro del bosque, de abejas susurrante,” but the “nine bean-rows” become “Habar de nueve filas” (403). It would be a mistake, however, to submit these labors of love, done with no particular public end in mind, to the probings of those sharpnosed reviewers that Alastair Reid has called “the translation police” (175).

Given Guillén's affinity for the aspectual poem (variations on a theme: Cántico's many ways of celebrating the miracle of existence), it comes as no particular surprise to see him try his hand at more than one translation of the same poem. This practice can be said to be in accord with symbolist doctrine. If for the symbolists a poem is never finished, then neither is its translation: as Biruté Ciplijauskaité points out in her useful study of Guillén's multiple translations of Rimbaud and Valéry in Homenaje, successive readings account for successive translations (14).

Valéry's sonnet “La Dormeuse” produces four renderings, each in a different verse form. The twelve-syllable French alexandrines become in turn verso libre (based loosely on a pattern of seven and eleven syllables), fourteen-syllable Spanish alejandrinos in sonnet form, eight-syllable ballad meter, and, finally, a sonnet of hendecasyllables. This is, of course, one way of responding to the challenge of translating poetry. Since there are no exact equivalences available to the translator, why not sift Valéry's image of the sleeping girl through the native language via the strictures of the classical sonnet, the venerable romance, or the looseness of a verse form much used by Juan Ramón Jiménez and Guillén's peers in the Generation of '27?

A look at Guillén's variations on the opening alexandrines helps suggest the effect of the different forms on the reader of Spanish, and also provides an opportunity to parse the mutations. First Valéry:

Quels secrets dans son coeur brûle ma jeune amie,
Ame par le doux masque aspirant une fleur?

(186)

Guillén begins with a verso libre rendition that spreads Valéry's two lines into five:

¿Cuáles son los secretos que en su corazón quema,
Joven, mi amiga,
Alma por una máscara
Muy dulce
Respirando el aroma de una flor?

(410)

This is followed by Spanish alejandrinos:

¿Mi amiga está quemando secretos de su vida,
Alma con dulce máscara que oliese una flor?

(412)

And in turn by the romance meter:

¿En su corazón secretos
Quema mi joven amiga,
Alma que por una máscara
Suave a una flor aspira?

(413)

The concluding form is the hendecasílabo of the classical Spanish sonnet:

¿Secretos hay quemados por mi amiga,
O está oliendo el aroma de una flor?

(414)

The single-mindedness of the vocabulary employed in these changes will escape no one's notice. No attempt is made to play with the equivalency brûler / quemar. Instead, different verb forms provide a variation: the simple present “quema” (twice), the present progressive “está quemando,” and the past participle “quemados.” Variations, of course, continue through the use of different meters and rhymes, but Guillén also employs slight semantic distinctions that add to the mutation effect. The question “Quels secrets?” that opens Valéry's sonnet undergoes a series of changes, from the quite similar question in the verso libre version (“¿Cuáles son los secretos”) to declarations with the interrogative lines of the alejandrinos and the romance, followed by a rephrasing of the question into two parts, “¿Secretos hay quemados” and “O está oliendo una flor?” Slippage of meaning inevitably begins to take place. By the fourth rendition, the word âme, a key to the reading of the poem, has disappeared (Ciplijauskaité 24).

Clearly this kind of exercise appealed to Guillén. In the “Variaciones” section of Homenaje there are multiple translations of poems by Rimbaud, Josep Carner, Romano Bilenchi, and Wallace Stevens. It is a tour-de-force in the best sense of the phrase, one that merits study for the light it throws on the translation process and also for its possibilities as a verbal equivalent to the well-known musical process of variations.⁶ The case of Wallace Stevens, however, registers a degree of difference. Guillén had much in common with Stevens. They both shared a rage for order, a common admiration for Santayana, a fondness for celebrating various aspects of the same thing (which Guillén carried over into translations: four ways of translating Valéry as opposed to thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird), and they both were poets at once extravagant and austere (Vendler 155). Above all, Guillén would have agreed with Stevens that heaven and hell had had their turn in poetry. What remained was to write the great poem of the earth.

Stevens followed “The Man in the Blue Guitar” with a series of poems preoccupied with the difference between the thing itself and the way it is seen. In “Study of Two Pears,” he comes down forcefully on the side of the object's independence from the subject: “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (Collected Poems 197). Guillén also had strong and long-held thoughts about the relationship between things and the observer. The balcony, window, table, and books in the room of the awakening poet in Cántico's Aristotelian aubade, “Más allá,” are “maravillas concretas” (21) that define and orient the speaker (“me centran, me limitan,” 16) and bestow mythical status upon the human condition: “La realidad me inventa, / Soy su leyenda. ¡Salve!” (18).

In his variation of “Study of Two Pears,” Guillén, while still translating in an “adherentísima” and “escrupulosísima” manner, allowed the phraseology of “Más allá” to intrude and make Stevens's theme more categorical than Stevens might have welcomed. He chose to translate Stevens's poem as literally as possible in unrhymed quatrains of nine syllables, in which faithfulness, so-called, still achieves a set form in Spanish. In the last stanza, he manages to duplicate in part Stevens's masculine endings with three versos agudos that conclude “Las peras nunca se revelan / A gusto del observador” (431).

After this exercise, Guillén rewrote the poem in an imitation entitled “Dos peras.” Consisting of one stanza less than the Stevens original, “Dos peras” uses seven-syllable redondillas, a form associated with Guillén (Navarro Tomás 102). Here Guillén's position on epistemology also comes through loud and clear, even more strongly than Stevens's: “No busco semejanzas. / Lo que son ya lo sé” (432). He follows, nevertheless, Stevens's description based on a still life suggestive of Cézanne. No matter how the stylization brought to bear by the painter or the poet affects the refraction of the object, Guillén does not hesitate to reaffirm Steven's concluding statement. In order to do so, he harks back to the first stanza of part VI of “Más allá”: “Dependo de las cosas! / ¡Sin mí son y ya están / proponiendo un volumen” (23). These lines written between 1932 and 1935 push their way forward some 30 years later to take over Stevens's claim and to reiterate in Spanish: “Las peras no dependen / De mi plan, de mi vista.”

Although there are many “variant readings in the argument of epistemology in Stevens” (Donoghue 227), there is only one in Guillén. The discovery of the world as irreducible and beloved underlies the strength and unity of Guillén's achievement. The verb depender in Cántico is a key to his relation with the world, and its reappearance, in a translation, underscoring the independence of objects seems almost inevitable.⁷

Guillén included one other Stevens poem in Homenaje. It is an imitation of Stevens's ode to the act of reading, “The house was quiet and the world was calm. / The reader became the book …” (358). The image of the poet among beloved books in congregation with peers throughout time sets much of the tone of Homenaje, and domestic tranquility in Guillén goes back to Cántico: “¡Beato sillón! La casa / Corrobora su presencia” (180).

“Can one man think one thing and think it long?” Stevens asks in “The Comedian as the Letter C” (Collected Poems 41). Readers of Guillén know the answer to that question. These examples from Homenaje show that his thought was consistent, and that it extended to the reading and glossing of others. Wrestling with his poetic foes, embracing his friends, and adjusting them all to his single-minded view of the world, he waged his war with other poets very much out in the open. His glosses, running the gamut from self-evident to subtle, become the kind of verse-criticism Harold Bloom (3) foresaw as the nature of poetry in an age of criticism.

Notes

1. Macrí (417-18, 426-27, 439) gives a breakdown by nationality of the authors Guillén glosses and/or translates. Part 1, “Al margen,” contains the names of 30 Spanish writers (including Guillén), four Latin American, two Portuguese, fifteen French, eight Italian, seven British, seven North American, five German, six classical Greek, seven Latin, and five from Oriental cultures, for a total of 96 names. Part 2, “Atenciones,” refers to 12 Spanish authors. Part 5, “Variaciones,” translates a total of 26 writers: three Portuguese, seven French, four Italian, three English, four North American, three German, one Japanese, and one Chinese.

2. Even the most desultory comparison between the versiones revividas of Leyenda and their originals in the canon points to the enormous sea changes these poems have undergone.

3. That is, intertextual analysis in Genette's restricted sense.

4. Antecedents abound for such exercises. Likely to have been known by Guillén are Jules Lemaître's En marge des vieux livres (1905-07), and, closer to home, Azorín's 1915 Al margen de los clásicos (Macrí 410).

5. Homenaje's title may have been suggested by Jules Supervielle's “Hommage à la vie,” translated in “Variaciones” (437-38). See Macrí 409. Guillén early on recognized a kindred spirit in Supervielle. Reviewing Saisir (1928) for El Norte de Castilla in 1929, he wrote “El poeta se lanza, desde el título, tras las cosas y sus fuerzas, sus penumbras, sus sueños” (Hacia Cántico 297).

6. It may be instructive to think of the musical changes of keys and octaves, and the mutation of notes as having a verbal equivalence in stanza, meter, rhyme, and semantic shift. In any event, Ricardo Gullón (122) is right to say that the four Spanish images of beauty breathing in the peace of sleep are equally expressive while at the same time not identical.

7. For an example of how Guillén imposes his voice and point of view in successive translations of Rimbaud, see Ciplijauskaité 17.

Works Cited

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Ciplijauskaité, Biruté. “El arte de la variación.” Hora de Poesía 38 (1985): 11-26.

Debicki, Andrew P. La poesía de Jorge Guillén. Madrid: Gredos, 1973.

Donoghue, Denis. “Nuances of a Theme by Stevens.” The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. 224-42.

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———. Clamor. Milan: Scheiwiller, 1968. Barcelona: Barral, 1977.

———. El poeta ante su obra. Ed. Reginald Gibbons and Anthony L. Geist. Pamplona: Peralta, 1979.

———. Hacia “Cántico”: Escritos de los años 20. Ed. K.M. Sibbald, Barcelona: Ariel, 1980.

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———. Leyenda (1896-1956). Libro inédito preparado y prologado por Antonio Sánchez Romeralo. Madrid: CUPSA, 1978.

Johnson, Barbara. “Les Fleurs du mal armé: Some Reflections on Intertextuality.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 264-80.

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———. Notebook 1967-68. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

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Reid, Alastair. “Basilisks' Eggs.” The New Yorker. 8 Nov. 1976: 175-208.

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———. Poesía completa (1). Prólogo de Ana Suárez Miramón. Madrid: Alianza, 1987.

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Vendler, Helen. “Wallace Stevens.” Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Random House, 1987. 123-55.