How fitting it is that Vicente Aleixandre has won the Nobel Prize! He is one of the greatest poets alive and his work stands for endurance, the roots under the tree of consciousness, the slowly growing trunk. He receives the prize for all the others of his generation in Spain, especially Jorge Guillen and Rafael Alberti. His generation was the astounding one, a concentration of genius unheard of in Spain for centuries, amazing in any country. Federico Garcia Lorca was the joyful bird of the group, composing poems on the piano; Rafael Alberti, the rationalist turned sailor, an ecstatic rationalist; Pedre Salinas, the gentle mason of love; Jorge Guillen, a worshipper of light; Luis Cernuda, who sang like a sad Job; and the enthusiastic Vicente Aleixandre, who was and is a kind of river, carrying trees torn up by the roots, everything turbid and wheeling, the things turned up frightening in the sunlight.

In his work you can see more clearly than in any poet in English the impact of Freud. The civilized Western man and woman has produced for several centuries a poetry that resembled a formal dance in a ballroom. Neruda, not being a European, had his dances outdoors, so it was left to Aleixandre to feel the full clash of Freud inside a drawing room. He evokes what it was like for a Westerner to read Freud's testimony of the immense and persistent sexual energy trying to rise into every vein and capillary of life and then go to a formal ball. He notices that

After Freud, moustaches become interesting in a public place:

The ladies wait for their moment seated upon a tear,
Keeping their dampness hidden with a stubborn fan,
and the gentlemen, abandoned by their buttocks,
try to draw all looks toward their moustaches.

That generation, some of whom published their first books in the late 1920's, came to be called "The Generation of '27." This generation welcomed Neruda when he came to Spain in the 30's, jumped feet first into surrealism, which they felt not as a clique but as an ocean, encouraged each other, tried to pull poetry simultaneously into surrealism and into song, and worked to help Spain feel in herself the new energy rising, both rebellious and sexual.

What happened? The rebellious energy they felt was felt also by the industrial workers and the farm workers. The defeat of the rebellious ended the energy flow. The Francoists shot Lorca, Alberti, Salinas. Cerauda, Guillen, Prades left Spain for the United States and Spanish America. Only Aleixandre, always in poor health, but stubborn, remained. The Franco people knew well where he stood, and he was kept silent by police and Control. In 1944 he was at last allowed to publish, and the book was the great Shadow of Paradise. By that time so much literature had been cut off near the ground, or torn up (Hernandez dead in prison, Spain isolated) that the younger writers felt abandoned, dead, in despair. It turned out that Aleixandre's decision to stay helped all that. He represented the wild energy still alive on Spanish soil. In fact, when I visited him in the late 60's, he was still living in the same house in the suburbs of Madrid where Lorca and Hernandez used to visit him.

All the young poets I met in Spain adored him; while I was visiting, there was a knock on the door, and a 20-year-old poet from Andalusia appeared, just arrived in Madrid. He had to see Aleixandre before he could settle down, what else could he do? Aleixandre gave him some practical advice, and showed him that he knew his poems. Aleixandre then read "The Waltz"—his ballroom poem—to both of us with terrific energy, and said happily, "Isn't it obscene!" He was hard to get hold of during those years, since he only answered the phone from 2 to 2:05 P.M. each day. One of the poets I was with the day before in a cafe suddenly cried out, "Oh God, it's 2:06! We missed it! Now we'll have to wait until tomorrow." So he preserved his privacy and yet remained open at the same time, a warm presence, a bridge between two Spains. Stephen Kessler, his translator from California, visited him last year and found the enthusiasm for him still increasing—the old grateful, the young dedicating their books to him.

After Shadow of Paradise, in 1944, Aleixandre gradually left the surrealist turmoil, and his poetry moved into what Lewis Hyde calls "Poems with White Light"—as contrasted with the "Red Light" Hyde senses in the earlier Freudian poems. A good example of the new style is his marvelous poem called "The Man on His Death Bed." This is Lewis Hyde's translation. A man is dying:

He put his hand to his chest and said:
Listen to me!
No one could hear a thing. A strange smile lowered its smooth mask like a veil
over his face, rubbing it out.
There was a little wind. Listen to me! Everyone, everyone strained their delicate ears.
Listen! And they heard it—pure and crystal tone—the silence.

Here is how he describes an old man whom he used to see sitting in the sum each day:

As the old man lived, as he waited, how the sun thinned him out!
How slowly it burned away the last wrinkles, his sad lined skin, the record of his misery,
how long it took, stripping and polishing everything!
In the silence the old man went slowly toward nothing, slowly surrendering himself,
the way a stone in a tumbling river gets sweetly abraded
and submits to the sound of pounding love.
And I saw the powerful sun slowly bite at him with great love, putting him to sleep
so as to take him bit by bit, so as to dissolve him with light bit by bit,
the way a mother might bring her child very softly back to her breast.

He continues to write these "poems of white light," poems with intellectual calm, with trust in the organic way of doing things, including the way people and creatures die, and a sweetness like that in Chaucer.

True to their famous myopia, none of the principal American publishing houses has printed a single book of Aleixandre's, and so he is virtually unknown here. As far as I know, only two books are in print, both provided by small presses….

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.