[Durán is a Spanish-born educator, critic, and poet who has published books on many Spanish and Latin American writers, including Pablo Neruda, Miguel de Cervantes, José Ortega y Gasset, Amado Nervo, Luis de León, and Francisco Quevedo. In the following overview of Aleixandre's career, Durán perceives a Romantic strain in the poet's verse.]

Why Aleixandre? More explicitly, why should the Nobel Prize for Literature be awarded to Vicente Aleixandre in 1977? Barbara Walters, speaking through a nationwide television program, declared that the poet was virtually unknown outside his native Spain (which only proves the lack of intellectual preparedness of our television announcers). And yet, if Lorca had been alive today, there is no question that the prize would have been his. The prize belongs not to a man, in this case, but to a whole generation, the generation of Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Al berti—perhaps the brightest and most original poetic generation in twentieth-century Western Europe. Not a restricted, disciplined group, as the French surrealists became, but rather a band of friends open to all influences.

I remember Aleixandre in the courtyard of his Madrid house, a great conversationalist who also knew when to listen. We talked about the romantics, dada, surrealism, the new trends: his blue eyes sparkled as he claimed that he had inherited from all movements, and by investing wisely he had increased the capital of poetry as a whole. Aleixandre is a tall man, with a noble face that seems to come out of a Michelangelo fresco, a modern prophet with a gravel voice and slow gestures. Wit and charm are part of his personality, and also personal warmth, yet the first impression is hard, almost overwhelming. The visitor is facing a giant, a giant who has attained the heights of poetic genius and is aware of it. Only slowly, step by step, the giant unwinds and becomes the most generous and cordial of hosts.

During our conversation I asked Aleixandre whether he could feel at home within any specific literary movement: he claimed the romantic movement came closest to his ideals. I both agreed and disagreed with his statement. Compared to an urbane and witty poet such as Pope, both Blake and Aleixandre, Keats and Baudelaire are brothers: a vast vision, a romantic sensitivity unites them. Yet compared to the other romantics, the style of Aleixandre's poems is clearly different. More difficult, more illogical, more mysterious, it is a style that has been profoundly influenced by surrealism.

There is an image which I feel can help us to understand the role of surrealism in contemporary poetry. If we think of a huge rocket as standing for the poetic vanguard movements in our century, then surrealism stands for the third stage of the rocket, the fastest and brightest stage. Every stage is marked by an increase in the anti-rational, illogical, subjective elements. Futurism, launched in 1909 by the Italian poet Marinetti in a manifesto written in French, wants to revolutionize subject matter, rhythm, rhyme, typography. Machines should be put on a pedestal; old legends and monuments should be put to the torch. Dadaism is invented by a Romanian, Tristan Tzara, in Zurich in 1916. Its aims are still more radical. As Stephen Spender puts it:

Dada began in 1916, and consisted of the cultivated madness of gestures directed against the madness of the war. Although Dada called itself revolutionary, its politics were not realistic or intended to be. Dada had no political program. The attitude of Dadaists was that mad and subversive and childish protests against the bourgeoisie were in themselves an already accomplished revolution in the lives of those who participated in them. ["Life Wasn't a Cabaret," The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 30, 1977.]

We are dealing, of course, with international movements. Writers such as Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry and Pierre Reverdy contributed to their launching, just at the time when the poems of the Chilean author Vicente Huidobro were helping to create a propitious climate for change both in Latin America and in Spain. And just as Picasso found inspiration in primitive American sculpture, Aleixandre brings to his observation of modern society the freedom, the power and the audacious sexual overtones that characterize his poems about the primitive world and the animals in the prehistoric jungle. In his poem "The Waltz," for instance, the poet's X-ray eyes discover under the elegance and refinement of a modern ballroom, with ladies and gentlemen dancing faster and faster, carried away by the tidal wave of music, the passion of sexual desires, their pubic hair carefully hidden under the formal dress, the same heady mixture of sex and death:

This is the instant the moment to say the word that explodes
the moment when long skirts become birds
windows scream out
light yells "help"
and the kiss waiting in the corner between two mouths turns into a thorn
that will give out death by saying
I love you.

In this poem, as in most other poems, Aleixandre destroys the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, fuses the ideal and the real, the imaginary and everyday experience: these two realms are shown to be one and the same. This is why he can be at the same time a great poet of nature—nature as the outside world of spaces, rivers, forests, seas, dawns, animal life—and a great surrealist poet, delving into the unconscious, swimming in the stream of his own mind. He realizes, as most surrealist poets did, that the conventions of the rational world, as opposed to the desires and visions of the subconscious world of dreams and fantasies, tend to split into two mutilated halves what for primitive man was a whole and sound universe; hence the cult of voluntary hallucination and the sudden changes of subject and perspective, which can be baffling indeed to the average reader. There can be no doubt that Aleixandre is one of the most difficult poets ever to use the Spanish language. More than Lorca, Guillén and even Cernuda, in his generation, he employs every device that can free the mind of its rational categories. He wills a new reality whose truth is poetic rather than scientific, universal rather than particular. His main tool is his uncommon imagination, which faces the ordinary world and "derealizes" it. In other words, the conventional boundaries between ordinary perception and delirious hallucination are broken down, and every conceivable approach to experience becomes permissible.

Aleixandre knows instinctively that the modern poet must grow wings, must soar beyond everyday life, must see reality both from above and from below. He goes back in time and plunges into an abyss that opens both in the past and in his inner self. As a great critic of contemporary Spanish literature, Ricardo Gullón, puts it:

Logically such an intense dreamer had to search for an answer where so many other poets before him looked for it, in the descent into Hell, in the underground where strange passions shed their dark light. Hell is now called the Subconscious, and the poet's guide is no longer Vergil or Orpheus but Rimbaud—yet a new name does not mean a new identity. And the traveler is called Surrealist, since under the outer layer of reality, beyond rational attitudes, in the abysses of dream, he is trying to discover the secret of Life and Death. From this dive into darkness Aleixandre came back a richer poet, both mysterious and lucid. His poems, like rivers, surround the reader slowly and inexorably, making him feel how much strength and vitality sparkle under the smooth surface of every word. [Literature española contemporánea, 1965]

It is difficult to know whether to characterize much of the nineteenth-century romantic verse as "religious." On the one hand, there is little overt reference to God or to religious subjects; on the other, many of the poems deal with experiences of a spiritual nature. Wordsworth, for instance, in "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," describes

… that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

These lines are inspired not by a supernatural power but by nature itself. What has caused in the poet an almost mystical trance are the trees, the fields, the sky.

The parallel between Aleixandre's poetry and William Blake's writings is even closer. They are both mystical and cosmic poets, visionary adventurers into the unknown. Blake's prophetic poems, like "The Four Zoas" and "The Book of Los" are extraordinarily complex, full of strange symbolism and self-created cosmologies. Aleixandre, in his "The Jungle and the Sea" (from Destruction or Love), likewise builds a vision of a primitive world through strange and powerful similes:

Far away in a remote
splendor of still virgin steel

there are tigers as large as hatred,
lions looking like a hirsute heart,
blood like placated sadness,
fighting against a yellow hyena shaped like the greedy sunset.

Aleixandre's cosmos, like Blake's, is animated by love. Yet the human elements in Blake are ever-present. His angels and titans are man himself writ large. Aleixandre goes back in his poetry to a primeval age in which man is a newcomer, almost an intruder. It is nature that rules man, not the other way around. And nature is restless—often, to the untrained human eye, pitiless. But there is love behind the destructive forces of nature. As I have noted elsewhere,

[Aleixandre's] poems, if read from beginning to end, evaluate man's place in the cosmos, define all creation, and sing of the communion of men, as temporal beings, with the universe and with other men; only in such communion can man endure and become eternal. Through his difficult symbolic and visionary imagery, derived mainly from dreams and surrealism, Aleixandre has managed to unify realities that seemed irreconcilable. Not unlike William Blake, in Aleixandre the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" appears as a possibility; chaos is but one aspect of order; love and communion accept—and transcend—death.

Everything in nature is alive, as Keats knew, as Baudelaire and Rubén Darío had proclaimed (let us add here that Darío was for Aleixandre the poet who taught him the true meaning of poetry). Aleixandre writes:

Perhaps the greatest book written by Aleixandre in the surrealist vein is Sombre del paraíso (Shadow of Paradise), begun in 1939, a year in which the whole of Span ish society lay in shambles. Jails and concentration camps were crowded. Most of the poet's close friends were dead or in exile. Life had to begin again from ground zero. Aleixandre took refuge in his memories of a happy childhood by the shores of the Mediterranean. As the critic Kessel Schwartz points out:

Aleixandre deviates somewhat from the tumultuous and disparate ambivalence of Destruction or Love, but in the old familiar distinctions between man and nature, he continues to denigrate the former. The old fire remains in sublimated form, although from time to time the frenzy and naked passion of Destruction or Love shine through, and the poet employs new dimensions of supplementary imagery. He returns to his innocent world of infancy, to a Paradise beyond original sin and knowledge, to be one with the heavens and the creatures of the dawn. [Kessell Schwartz, Vicente Aleixandre, 1970]

Cosmic unity is the underlying theme of the book:

Yes, poet: cast off this book which pretends to
enclose in its pages a sparkle of sunlight,
and look at the light face to face, while your head
is supported on this rock,
while your feet so far away feel the final kiss of the setting sun
and your uplifted hands sweetly touch the moon,
and your hanging hair leaves a wake among the stars.
("The Poet")

The poet is surrounded by innocent, virginal creatures. Hatred and sin have not yet been invented by Man:

There each morning the birds were born,
surprising, all new, full of life, celestial.
Their tongues of innocence
said no words…
Birds of initial happiness, opening their selves,
trying out their wings, without losing the virginal drop of dew!
("Creatures in the Dawn")

Yet the poet's journey is not at an end. In Historia del corazón (History of the Heart), written between 1945 and 1953, Aleixandre comes back from Paradise in order to face all the ambiguity and anguish of our own times. As Kessel Schwartz describes it:

The central theme concerns human solidarity and compassion for the victims of injustice…. Although he reserves his deepest and subtlest meanings for the description of historical and existential man, the poet also portrays his own life and personal past. No longer the creature of telluric forces… the poet, as a man, becomes all men, destined like him to live and die, without the assurance of Paradise or eternal life, in a world where death is always with us. [Schwartz, Vicente Aleixandre]

Nevertheless, it is not necessary to live desperate solitary lives, the poet exclaims with tenderness and optimism, as he signs for all mankind of fleeting time and human solidarity. Infants and oldsters mark the boundaries between being and not being, life and death. The poet recognizes that he is aging, but is without despair, empathizing with his neighbor who must also stoically face the end.

Rebellion, love and death are fused in one single existential vision:

the lover knows that he passes and disappears,
that love itself passes
and that this generous fire that still endures in him
witnesses pure the sweet passage of that which eternally passes.
("Like the Thistledown")

The message is clear: man must learn to say "yes" both to life and love, on the one hand, and on the other, when it comes, to death and oblivion: "Oh dark night. I no longer expect anything. / Solitude does not lie to my senses. / The pure, calm shadow reigns" ("Final Shadow").

Perhaps the main feature of Alexandre's poetry is the feeling of unity and organic growth that it creates in its readers. We are aware that each book has its own style, its peculiar characteristics, and at the same time that each book has a role to play in the corpus of Aleixandre's writings. The motto of this corpus could be "order and wisdom out of chaos"—yet an order and a wisdom that do not mask or conceal at any time the persistence of chaos, violence, anguish and ultimately death. Aleixandre's youthful poetry can be compared to a tornado, a nova exploding in the sky, a torrent of lava pouring into a primeval jungle. His later books are less violent and more nostalgic, as the poet opens his heart toward his own past and toward the suffering of his fellowmen.

The first period would stretch from 1928, the date of publication of his first book, Ambito (Space), to 1953, with Nacimiento último (The Last Epiphany). Its dominant trait is power: immense telluric and cosmic forces are deployed before us. They look for unity, love, ultimate fusion. The spectacle is at the same time fascinating and terrifying. The masterpieces of this period, La destructión o el amor (Destruction or Love; 1935) and Sombra del paraíso (Shadow of Paradise; 1944), are organized around a main character which is basically not a human being but rather the whole cosmos, nature, the primeval creation of natural forces: man is only one of the many forces that nature deploys in its search for unity.

The second period, from Historia del caramón (1953) to Poemas de la consumación (Poems of Consummation; 1968), is less subjective, less irrational. The wild visions are replaced by an awareness of human time and human suffering. The first book belonging to this period, Historia del caramón, is basically the story of a love affair, in its daily moments of joy and anguish, and also the story of a growing awareness, a solidarity: the poet realizes that he is only one member of a vast society, the Spanish people, and that ultimately he is a part of mankind. Solidarity means a realization of finitude—the small, finite self is bound to disappear soon—and at the same time a source of strength: other human beings, very much like the poet, will go on living and loving. To this period belongs the book Retratos con nombre (Portraits with Names), thirty-seven poems each of which captures the physical and psychic essence of a friend of the poet: the poet's pen becomes a camera, one with great sensitivity and clear focus. One of the poems, "Birthday," is a self-portrait: in it Aleixandre retraces step by step his own life as objectively and dispassionately as possible, and not without humor.

Self-knowledge is a door to wisdom: the last books by Aleixandre, Poemas de la consumación and Diálogos del conocimiento (Dialogues of Knowledge; 1974), are often desolate and tragic, yet serene. Human life has an end, old age is but the prelude to death, nothing—and nothingness—awaits us. The poet speaks with a soft voice, as in a confession or in evoking a memory too painful to explain in full detail. Often his sentences become brief, mysterious, contradictory. They remind us of the fragments of Heraclitus. Perhaps paradox and contradiction are the only weapons left to our mind: knowledge has to be paid for; logic can lead us only so far. For this last stretch of the journey the poet's mind must turn once again to irrational utterings. Yet the meaning of these books is not obscure: one must learn to say both "yes" and "no" to death and nothingness, the poet tells us. We must bow to what is and will be, and at the same time, as Dylan Thomas advised, we must not go too gently, too meekly, into the dark night of death: life is too precious for us not to regret its passing.

Organic growth is, as we have seen, the key feature in Aleixandre's poetry: plus ça change, plus c'est la mĉme chose, since even in his philosophical poems dealing with death and old age we feel the fires of youth and desire burning under the smooth surface of each poem. Aleixandre's books encompass the "seven ages of man," and the remarkable feeling of unity, of growth within the frame of one individuality and one style, can be generated only because the poet is a master of Spanish poetic language and can thus clearly etch his own personality, his own vision of life, into each book, whether the book deals with the world as seen by an enthusiastic adolescent or whether we are listening to an old man waiting for death.

This is in itself a great merit—and yet it does not fully explain the range of Aleixandre's style. His poems are above all noble, "large," uplifting: we are always facing giants, a larger-than-life vision of the landscape and the figures in it. This feeling of grandeur can be attributed in part to some of the subjects; the sea, for instance, is a recurring theme. Yet there is more: Aleixandre has created, out of the influence of surrealism, a multi-layered style, one in which symbols are hidden behind words, and each line calls to mind a new group of symbols flying through the air toward the reader. For example, many of his nature poems can be read three ways, the first interpretation being that of a dream, a vision. And then the symbols begin to appear, both the Freudian and Jungian variety. The poem unfolds, new dimensions are added to it: it is a poem about a visionary poet, who at the same time is a child looking for his mother—and afraid of his parents—and a whole people remembering its past and the origins of the world. Thus in one of his earliest poems, in which he describes a stormy sea, menacing yet somehow attractive:

The bituminous sea crushes shadows
against itself. Hollows of deep blue
remain frozen in every arch of the waves…
Under lofty black skies the deep mouth bellows
and demands night. The mouth, the sea, everything
calls for darkness, deep, huge darkness,
the horrible jaws want to eat, they show us
all their white teeth of foam.
A tongue huge as a pyramid, ominous, cold,
rises up, demands….
("Sea and Night")

We see here how a positive symbol can acquire dramatically negative characteristics. The sea, symbol of fertility, of the feminine principle of fertility, is presented as something dark and menacing. In Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols we read that the symbolic meaning of the sea "corresponds to the 'lower ocean,' to waters in motion. It is a transitive and mediating agent between the shapeless elements (air, gas) and the elements solidly shaped (earth, solidity) and by analogy between life and death. The sea, the oceans, are thus considered to be the fountain of life and also its end. 'To return to the sea' is like 'to return to the mother,' that is, to die." In Aleixandre the traditional symbols of the collective unconscious, the Jungian symbols, are reinforced very often, in a parallel system, by Freudian symbols: are not the "white teeth of foam" and the "tongue huge as a pyramid" the clearest poetic definitions of the "vagina dentata" which is a frequent motif of Freud's clinical writings?

Nostalgia is for the poet a normal and healthy reaching from our present consciousness toward the past, toward our roots. Human life is like a tree: its vast trunk, its leaves and flowers are easily seen, yet the roots are invisible, underground. We must always remember them, for without them, without the lost paradise of our unconscious world, our world of dreams, our childhood memories, we are no longer fully human. And yet another movement, a movement forward and upward, must also be emphasized: the open hand, the open arms, the solidarity with other human beings. After being long confined in his room, the poet goes out to the street, to the square, in order to mingle with other human beings and be a part of humanity:

The poet can become a full-fledged member of mankind, can feel at home with the crowd, without losing his individuality. Paradise lost was not completely lost: a glimmer of the ancient light can be seen when we join arms with other human beings. The inescapable—and welcome—message is, we are not alone, if only we look around. This message is made even more explicit in his next book, En un vasto dominio (In a Vast Dominion; 1962). Again we can find in Aleixandre's poetry an echo of the great romantic poets. Wordsworth had written,

Man is not alone, because—as Plato believed, as the theory of reincarnation holds—much wisdom, the untold knowledge of many previous lives, of previous beings, the experience even of animals, stones, water, infinite space, travels in our veins into our mind and heart. Man appears as an atom in a vast cosmos, but if the universe is curved about itself, man daring the vastness of time and space would then return on himself, perhaps from the route of the infinitesimally small.

Finally, if the world is created by the effort of arms and hands, and the earth itself, in a sense, is a product, a town also becomes a living unit, as do its citizens, a part of the landscape as they perform their daily tasks. Since things, life, man, love, history, spirit, and flesh are all material … Aleixandre stresses the need for collective participation in the process of salvation. Human life is still an arduous effort, but with the aid of men, both present and past, we may achieve continuity. [Schwartz]

In his recent work Aleixandre, once more, renews himself without changing his poetic personality. His two last books, Poemas de la consumación and Diálogos del conocimiento, with their short sentences, their paradoxes, their moments (flashes) of illumination, remind me of Heraclitus, of the Oriental mystics, of Schopenhauer. Wisdom, resignation, a sad acceptance, a stubborn resistance. From surrealism to wisdom: this is the trajectory—a long and fruitful journey—of our poet. As Robert Bly has written: "For the Nobel Prize to come to Aleixandre now is fitting, not only because of the energy and intensity of his own poetry, but because it comes at this moment in Spanish history. Spain is waking up after years of sleep, and Aleixandre's poetry and stubborn presence have a strong part in that awakening" [The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 30, 1977].