[A Chilean-born American educator and critic, Daydí-Tolson is the author of The Post-Civil War Spanish Poets (1983) and Five Poets of Aztlan (1985). In the following excerpt, he traces Aleixandre's early career from Ambito to Sombra del paraíso—the collection that marks the arrival of artistic maturity for Aleixandre, according to Daydí-Tolson.]

When in 1977 the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre, the name and works of the new laureate were little known outside of Spain and Latin America. He was mainly an author for hispanists, the poet for literary experts. Post-war Spanish poetry was represented in the mind of foreigners by Federico García Lorca and, in some cases, by the less popular poet Jorge Guillén, both of them contemporaries and good friends of Aleixandre. After the Civil War (1936-39) Spain had become for many a silent world, the domain of intellectual backwardness and governmental censorship; a Nobel Prize could not have been found in such a land, barren of literary greatness. But in later years Spain had begun to change, and no longer could it be considered a repressed society and a cultural wasteland—poetic voices were heard coming from the forgotten nation, and that of Vicente Aleixandre was the most resounding. Like a deep current flowing up from the years before the war, his voice filled the gap between those poets who had died or left the country and the younger generations of post-Civil-War Spain.

Since the nineteen twenties, Vicente Aleixandre has always been present in Spain's literary scene. He has lived through the years of the Republic, the Civil War, and the seemingly never-ending Franco era. He was one of the intellectuals of his generation who, although against the fascist regime, remained in his country after the war. Thus he became a model and master for the new poets who began to write in the cultural vacuum of the first years of dictatorship. His name alone could represent the tradition of poetry in a country that, having reached the excellence of an intellectual tradition in the twenties and thirties, preferred for a while the dictates of dogma and fanaticism over the freedom of art and spirit. Aleixandre stood, with his poetry and his personal attitude, in opposition to that state of affairs and kept alive the spirit of that earlier period of intellectual liberalism and aesthetic experimentation. Having now received the Nobel Prize, he understands the implicit indication that the recognition is not only for his personal work but also for the centuries-long tradition of Spanish literature, undeservedly forgotten in our days.

In his address to the Swedish Academy, Aleixandre states explicitly the idea that poetry is, above all, tradition ["Discurso de recepción del Premio Nóbel," Insula, No. 378, 1978]. The poet, then, is but a link between past and future, and his being great is conditioned by the literary and cultural circumstances in which he has to live. In Aleixandre's case, the past is represented by two different moments: the immediate one—the Generation of 1898 and its nineteenth-century predecessors; and the more remote one—the Spanish Golden Age. Through them, of course, the poet comes in contact with a wider range of influences, sometimes difficult to account for. The present circumstance—the horizontal tradition he talks about—encompasses a long period of more than fifty years of Spanish literary history. As a young man Aleixandre was part of a group of poets which included, besides Lorca and Guillén, the names of Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, and Rafael Alberti. As a mature poet he took the responsibility to see that the younger generations could express themselves beyond the limitations of despair and conformism. In his old age he has become the sacred figure of the eternal poet, the voice that reincarnates itself in those few select men and women that have been given the gift of poetry. Today, Aleixandre himself is tradition.

His works, more that many other poets' productions, are a reflection of the circumstances in which the author lived. It could be said that Aleixandre's poetry evolves in harmonious correspondence with the main trends of Spanish lyric poetry from his first published poems, written in a period of highly technical and aesthetic literature, to the last collection of dramatic monologues, in some aspects related to late forms of lyric discourse in present-day Spain. In the last five decades Spanish poetry has passed through several alternate styles and modes of conceiving the poetic phenomenon and the poet's task. Aleixandre has been directly in contact with every new development, accepting with a clear conviction that man is determined by his being here and now. His work then is that of a writer who senses what the main current of poetic feeling is at a particular historical moment.

This somewhat vague characterization can be better illustrated by looking at what Aleixandre considers to be the essence of the poet. In his address to the Swedish Academy he defines the poet as a prophet, a seer. Reminiscent of the Platonic interpretation, Aleixandre's idea has its antecedent in Surrealism and can be traced back to Romanticism. This conception of the poet as a means for other voices to express themselves, as a superior being who can be in touch with the cosmos and with the essence of man, has a direct relation with the other concept also mentioned in the poet's address—the complete immersion of the writer in a particular tradition, because it is this tradition in which the seer finds the voices he has to assume as his: the voices of his people. Poetry, then, is a form of communication; it is the revelation of the common spirit of the people that takes the voice of the poet to make itself understood by all.

All of this is documented in Aleixandre's writings. In his address to the Swedish Academy he only restates what have always been the basic tenets of his poetic vocation. But it is not only in reference to concepts that the address corroborates a long-sustained idea of poetry; in it there is also a rhetorical device that has a meaningful value beyond its apparent common function as an expression of humility. Aleixandre refers to himself as "the poet" on several occasions when he should have used either the first person pronoun or his own name. A similar preference for impersonality is also manifest in Aleixandre's poetry, and particularly in the books written after the Civil War. Many of his poems convey a certain sense of anonymity, a feeling that the voice does not belong to a definite person. After reading the complete poems of Aleixandre, what seemed at first to be only a vague feeling ends up being a central characteristic of his poetic discourse. It will be of interest to follow, through fifty years of writing poetry, the development of that voice.

Born in 1898, Aleixandre began his literary career in the twenties, a great period in Spanish literature. His generation, besides being interested in Spanish tradition, was bewildered by the new aesthetic, philosophical and scientific ideas of post-war Europe. The climate of Spanish middle-class life was in those days defined by cultural interests, intellectual curiosity, and literary activity. In Madrid, where Aleixandre had lived since boyhood, there were more than enough places to meet other intellectuals and be informed of new trends as well as the established and admired ideas of the older generations. Literary cafés, theaters, art galleries, the Ateneo, and the very important Residencia de Estudiantes were the meeting places for poets and writers, painters and artists, historians and philosophers, masters and disciples. Friendship was the common link among many of the young poets, artists, and intellectuals. In this spirit of comradeship Aleixandre found his poetic vocation and his first admiring readers and editors.

He had little interest in poetry before becoming a member of the literary group that today is known as the Generation of 1927. Although he was an avid reader, he did not like poetry and avoided reading it, convinced as he was from his high school years that such literature neither provided much enjoyment nor had any intellectual value. By eighteen his attitude had changed radically, thanks to the friendship of another young poet, Dámaso Alonso, who gave him an anthology of poems by Rubén Darío. The reading of that book was decisive for Aleixandre: "… that truly virginal reading—the poet writes later—produced a revolution in my spirit. I discovered poetry: my great passion in life was then revealed to me and took hold of me never to be uprooted again." He then began to write, but his first publications did not appear until almost ten years later. It is undoubtedly very important to record the fact that it was after reading Darío's poems that the young writer discovered his own poetic vein.

Critics see no noticeable traces of Darío's influence in Aleixandre's works. It has to be acknowledged, though, that Aleixandre has a spiritual correspondence with the Latin American poet and that he follows him in several ways that are not easy to trace and analyze because they are less a matter of stylistics than of general attitudes toward art and reality. For the young Spanish poet-to-be, Darío's works meant not only the fascinating discovery of the manifold possibilities of language but also the realization of the poetic view of man as a passionate lover who is consumed by love. Poetic language in Darío reaches a level of communicative effectiveness directly dependent on the poet's ability to create a purely fictional reality that represents, in metaphorical terms, an otherwise inexpressible understanding of man and existence. No less important to the effectiveness of this poetic language is the general tone of passionate materialism, an essential sensuality not at all alien to a desire for spiritual transcendence. These were aspects of Darío's literary accomplishment that Aleixandre could certainly have felt as profoundly inspiring because they found an echo in his own spirit.

The influence of Darío is not so evident in Aleixandre's first published compositions, for during the period in which he was working on them the author had an intense literary relationship with other young poets who declared their interest in favor of Juan Ramon Jiménez and the theories of "pure" poetry. Aleixandre's participation in the activities of the group that shared in the literary experimentations, discussions, and definitions typical of those times explains the influence of the ruling taste on Ambito, his first collection of poems. It also explains why that book came to be published. Aleixandre's interest in poetry not only began under the influence of a friend, but his actual career as a poet was launched by a few friends who took some of his poems to the then recently founded Revista de Occidente, where they appeared in 1926.

Aleixandre published Ambito, on which he had been working since 1922, in 1928. It was a typical product of that decade and for some critics seems to be totally unrelated to the rest of Aleixandre's work. But, in spite of its many debts to other poets highly considered at the time, Ambito is something more than an exercise in imitative writing. As the poet discovered years later, this first book represents a starting point of his whole production, a basis for later developments. A few analyses have demonstrated that in its pages are to be found several of the most characteristic aspects of Aleixandre's poetry.

If compared with the rest of the poet's books Ambito looks particularly different in its external characteristics, it is because following the examples of Juan Ramón Jiménez and other younger poets Aleixandre wrote a carefully structured book, not at all different, as Alonso points out, from many other books of poems published in those days [Dámaso Alonso, Poetas españoles]. Thirty-five poems closely related to each other form this highly structured work. Most of the compositions are written in traditional meters, some of them merely a variety of the "romance" or of other types of regular stanzas. His combined use of different meters in the same poem can be seen as a first step toward free verse, which will characterize Aleixandre's poetic language. Equally indicative of an evolution are several cases of enjambment and verse punctuation that break the fixed rhythm of the metric pattern. The basic model, however, was set by the careful treatment of rhythm and rhyme in Juan Ramón's post-modernist aestheticism.

Several other aspects of Ambito will be seen again in the rest of Aleixandre's work. In addition to technical details of a stylistic nature, perhaps the most important elements are the glimpses of irrational imagery, suggestive of Surrealism, and the cosmic vision of man and nature as identical in essence. Love is the central motive of these poems and represents a way for man to achieve fusion with all matter. Even though the book appears to narrate the personal experience of a deep understanding of the human condition on a cosmic level, the main subject of such experience is in some way veiled or diluted by a rather detached impersonality. The well-structured plan of the collection and the well-composed poems correspond to a stylistic restraint in no way different from that characteristic of some manifestations of "pure" poetry. In Aleixandre's literary career, Ambito represents a first attempt, the product of several years of apprenticeship in the active workshop of his generation: the cultural life of Madrid. His poetic ideas were not yet defined, and his style was not his own. To find in this book the first manifestations of traits characteristic of the future work of the author is not an unjustified critical procedure, as long as one does not overlook the fact that when published Ambito was more than anything else an imitative work. Its originality will emerge from a comparative reading of Aleixandre's later work.

Shortly after Ambito was published, Aleixandre began work on his second book, Pasión de la tierra. Although it was finished within a year, the new collection remained unknown in Spain until 1946. Only a few copies of a 1935 Mexican edition reached Spain, and hence the book could not have had any noticeable influence on. the literary milieu. Even though Pas ion de la tierra is totally different from Ambito, it is also a book representative of its time, a time of radical changes in aesthetic ideas and methods. If the book had been published in 1929, immediately after the author finished writing it, it would have become one of the most important surrealist books in Spanish literature. Most of its commentators consider Pasión de la tierra as the real starting point of Aleixandre's characteristic poetic language, viewing Ambito as a far less important antecedent. When Aleixandre wrote the latter he was able to resolve every stylistic problem by recurring to the wellknown set of acceptable and already established solutions. The poet was acting within the predetermined patterns of a tradition. With Pas ion de la tierra, those fixed channels of poetic expression are totally disrupted, and although language retains its functional coherence, the expression itself lacks the normal logical or sentimental aspects which might render it meaningful to a reader. By means of the new technique of free association of purely mental images, the poet tries to express within the limits of language a series of unedited visions belonging to a level of reality revealed by psychoanalysis and pointed out earlier by a few nineteenth-century poets who may be considered Aleixandre's literary antecedents. The contrast between Ambito and Pasión de la tierra is such that they seem to be the works of two completely different authors: a poet of the post-modernist aesthetic tradition and a surrealist.

Ample literary analysis has proved beyond any doubt the surrealistic character of Pas ion de la tierra; but for a while the term "surrealism" was used in reference to this work only to deny any interpretation that would see the influence of the French school in Aleixandre's poetry. The poet was partial to that critical attitude and insisted that he was not a surrealist, although he made reference to his knowledge of Freud's writings. The truth of the matter is that for Spaniards it has seemed very important to make a clear distinction between French "surrealism" and Spanish "superrealismo," the difference being that in Spain there is no organized literary school, as in France. One of the characteristics of the poets of the Generation of 1927 is precisely their will to act as individuals; none of them belonged to or professed, knowingly, the principles of a particular literary school.

But it would be misleading to state that Aleixandre was creating completely on his own when he happened to write Pasión de la tierra, a book so clearly representative of Surrealism. The sudden change of style and of literary objectives apparent in this unprecedented book could not have originated as a sudden revelation but must have been the result of a well-informed confidence in the value of psychoanalytical theories and in the effectiveness of the technique of "automatic writing." By deciding on a surrealist form of expression rather than using the more conventional style of his first compositions, Aleixandre was, first of all, accepting the theoretical principles behind the surrealist method and stating, as well, his revolt against established tradition.

Aleixandre's poetic break with traditional ways of writing is not just another literarily playful experiment but a much more complex phenomenon, as would be the case with any sincerely serious writer. The attraction of aesthetic experimentation, so much a part of the literary scene of the thirties, did not touch the spirit of Aleixandre. On the contrary, he stated very distinctly his belief in the importance of message over form, thus presenting a good argument against his previous book, the product of a formalist and aestheticist composition. Between the carefully measured and well-combined verses of Ambito, the expression of a restrained voice, and the entirely loose prose of Pasión de la tierra there is a difference not only in external form and poetic techniques but more significantly in the attitude and tone of voice of the speaker, which, in turn, have their manifestation in the other, more visible distinctions. It is only natural that once tradition is attacked and abandoned by the artist, the attitude of the speaker changes from dutiful acceptance to rebellious opposition to the norm.

In Aleixandre's work this opposing force took the external form of prose, better suited than verse for the demanding verbal flux of his new voice. The model for it had already been set in the novel and the poet merely adapted it to a still deeper search in the human psyche and its world of fascinating dreams, fears, and desires. His reasons for using prose are to be sought in Aleixandre's own emotional experiences, his work being a journey into the inner self, a desperate and obsessive search for life and its meaning in an existence jeopardized by imminent dissolution: death. There is no need to speculate about particular motives behind each prose poem or even each dream-like image. Enough psychological analyses and commentaries are at hand to satisfy this type of curiosity. What really matters is to realize that by using the technique of automatic writing Aleixandre was rebelling against emotional restraint and aesthetic formality.

The prose in Pasión de la tierra is a sign of a truly new attitude; it is the obvious response to a need for expanding verse and its different possible combinations in order to express the new images and their concatenation in the freely associative flow of the discourse. And this, in turn, is the consequence of a renewed function of the voice. Surrealism had offered a philosophical basis and a technical device to the poet who was already in need of them. The almost mystical union of man with the cosmos as presented in Ambito does not have the same powerful conviction that is found in the prose poems of Pasión de la tierra. The attitude of the speaker is constrained by tradition in the first book and freed from any delimitations in the latter. This change has been possible thanks to the discovery of the unconscious, an aspect of the self which has its own voice, an entity different from the author, although in this case it does not represent a completely conscious invention, as lyric voices normally do.

This voice of the unconscious follows its own rules, if it is possible to use such a term in reference to a discourse apparently devoid of any form of predetermined governing pattern. Bousoño has studied the basic formula of the irrational image as used by Aleixandre in his surrealist period ["Las técnicas irracionalistas de Aleixandre," Insula, No. 374-75, Jan.-Feb., 1978]. By following the critic's line of reasoning one can imagine the many other possible formulas that made the text a poetic text and not a mere piece of psychoanalytical monologue; the type of structure involved in the poetic text does show similarities to a psychiatric patient's discourse, but the two differ in that the poet's discourse follows a more intentionally artistic process of selection and organization. The poet is also consistent in maintaining the same level of illogicality throughout the concatenation of images, which appear in a seemingly breathless emission of unaccented speech. The utterance is that of an undetermined speaker who talks from the depths of the reader's inner being—the voice, as it were, of the speaker's own unconscious.

Prose reproduces, better than verse, the free flow of speech, the monotonous and uncontrolled wording of oneiric visions made up of a web of apparently unrelated images. A return, then, to versification in Espadas como labios, written after Pasión de la tierra, strikes one as a significant poetic decision. As Aleixandre declared years later, after writing the prose poems of his previous book he felt a strong desire to write again in verse—that is, to impose a certain control over the chaotic mass of images being formed in the unconscious. The verse transcription of the surrealistic associative images indicates a certain hesitancy in the author. Several compositions make use of traditional verses; others, in a procedure similar to the one used in some poems of Ambito, combine verses of different metric value. The result, as any reader of contemporary poetry can attest, is a rhythm and cadence not totally unheard before but more varied than the traditional metric patterns in order to appeal to a new sensitivity.

More than the choice between prose and verse, images and syntax are, to a great extent, responsible for the hypnotic or "possessed" tone of the voice both in Pasión de la tierra and Espadas como labios. Prose and verse in each case are only helpful transcriptions of the discourse. The use of hendecasyllabic and octosyllabic verses brings back to the voice the constraint found in Ambito. Espadas como labios exemplifies in its two types of metric preferences the poet's doubts and experimentations with his medium. The short poems, with a more or less regular metric form, embody a tone and attitude of control even when the images talk of strong emotions; from this duality emerges a feeling of tension quite in agreement with the general character of the book. The longer poems make use of free verse in accordance with a freer attitude of the speaker, who seems to allow his emotional state to appear in the poem. This second type of composition will be improved in the next book, La destructión o el amor, and will continue to be a characteristic in Aleixandre's subsequent works.

It has been a common practice to describe free verse, or versicle, as a juxtaposition of basic rhythms already defined in traditional metrics. For Lázaro Carreter this kind of analysis does not help to define properly the rhythmic characteristics of the versicle because it implies that the free verse is nothing but a rather unsystematic variation of the same unchangeable patterns of old use ["El versículo de Vicente Aleixandre," Insula, Nos. 374-75, Jan.-Feb. 1978]. For him, the versicle is the expression of the emotive changing rhythm of the voice's discourse, and it is constituted by a series of varied kinds of repetitions, except rhyme and isosyllabism. Repetition is to be found in any of the different levels of the poetic discourse: the phonic, the syntactic, and the semantic levels. Any correspondence of the versicle with traditionally established meters is only circumstantial, and the many ruptures of the norm should be taken into account before trying to generalize about the metric nature of the versicle. The hendecasyllabic elements present in Aleixandre's poems are not only the consequence of a natural tendency of a poet well-versed in classical Spanish poetry to follow loosely the common rhythm of a poetic language but also the critic's habit of explaining the new by means of the old.

After Espadas como labios, published in 1932, Aleixandre does not make much use of regular versification, his preference being for the versicle. Although there are differences in the length and varieties of the versicles among some of the books, all of them have in common a series of reiterations and pauses which have no direct relation, in most cases, to traditional metrics. Essential to Aleixandre's versicle, then, are a series of stylistic devices which by repetition stress the value of resonance. Several of them are found in Espadas como labios and become truly characteristic of La destruction o el amor, published in 1935. The obvious reiterative procedures are, of course, the anaphora, the repetition of words and clauses, alliterations, and assonances. Not so commonly seen as a case of repetition is apposition, used as a way of giving a new image to name that which the first image or word possibly did not express totally. In relation to this technique, very effective in the creation of a rhythmic pattern in the poem, there is the indecision of the speaker in choosing the appropriate way to express something. In some cases it is as if the speaker were almost stuttering or trying different ways to put his vision into words. But the most characteristically Aleixandrian of all the devices is the use of the conjunction or, not as a disjunctive property but as a means of identifying two words or two images. The constant use of this conjunction—present even in the title of one of the books—provides a great number of repetitions, or more exactly, of rhythmic pairings in the text.

Only a very detailed analysis of the poems would give an adequate idea of all the possibilities of the versicle in expressing the various attitudes and emotional states of the speaker. This type of versification has its first antecedent in the combination of traditional meters as seen in Ambito. The experience of the free prose of Pasión de la tierra taught the poet how to extend the common Spanish metric patterns to a much more flexible rhythmic use of the language. For Aleixandre, the versicle was the best available solution to communicate his particular conception of man and his destiny. The first book in which the versicle takes its most characteristic form is La destructión el amor, a book that puts into effect the poetic ideas of Aleixandre as stated in his note to the second edition of Gerardo Diego's anthology, published in 1934 [Poesía españoles contemporànea].

In the first edition of the anthology, published in 1932, the poet expresses his doubts about the function and value of poetry; two years later he has a more positive outlook. Without intending an explanation of a coherent poetic theory closely related to a general cosmic vision of man and nature, for Aleixandre all elements of creation, all matter, are only different manifestations of the one and only universal entity:

Flor, risco o duda; o sed o sol o látigo:
el mundo todo es uno, la ribera y el párpado
["Quiero Saber"]

The chaotic enumeration of terms referring to human aspects—physical and emotional—and to animate and inanimate nature underlines the meaning of the statement. The same effect should be attributed to the repeated use of the conjunction "o" as identifier of unrelated terms, characteristic of Aleixandre's style in this period. The much commented conception of the unity of all existing matter has led critics to look for its antecedents in pre-Socratic philosophers and mystics. More contemporary equivalences besides surrealism could be found in philosophy, theology, psychology, and the natural sciences, insofar as all of these disciplines have advanced theories in this century of a similar unity of all existing matter, man included. For Aleixandre this universal identity explains the destructive power of love, the central force in the process of cosmic fusion. In the tradition of modern poetry, the Spanish author has looked to art for the true knowledge of the essence of reality and has tried to formulate in words his philosophical conviction.

Although man is part of that cosmic unity and as such will be fused with all creation, Aleixandre believes that man has little knowledge of his predicament and needs a way of becoming aware of it; thus poetry, which is the "clairvoyant fusion of man with creation, with that which perhaps has no name." The poet, then, is seen as a possible receptive "magnetic pole" of all the forces coming from the mysterious cosmos with which he becomes one. It is natural that Aleixandre should declare that "poetry is not a matter of words." What really matters for him is, paraphrasing his terms, not the false luminosity emanating from the crystal of poetic language, but the real light of knowledge. Language is unable to make this light visible if it has to conform to established patterns of expression; and since it has always been used under control, language has never had enough power to signify the profound and mysterious luminosity of true reality. The poet has to disregard the regular forms of poetic writing and create his own, in a daily effort to produce the "light of the poem." He runs away from the well-known toward the spheres of absolute truth.

As in Pasión de la tierra, Aleixandre is still driven by the desire for authenticity and looks for revelation on the level of the surreal, where words change their everyday meaning to make manifest in the poem the revealed truth. The poet is listening to the messages of the cosmos and makes of them a sensitive and communicating expression completely different from the normal aesthetic form of speaking. It is a form of surrealism, except that in this case the author no longer writes the utterances of an unconscious self, a first-person individuality, but becomes the voice of all life and matter expressing itself through the unconscious of someone who acts as a sibyl, a point of fusion between man and cosmos.

The reference to classical tradition does not come to mind as a mere rhetorical device. In La destrucción o el amor Aleixandre's poetry reaches a certain vaguely ancient tone of pagan pantheism. As if the relationship among books were the same one to be found among the poems of each book and the verses of each poem, every element of the total work is placed in reference to the rest. Thus, in Ambito the desire and search for a passionate embrace with nature is already expressed: the final poem of the collection narrates such an encounter. The next step takes the poet, freed from all previous prejudices of ideas and formulaic exteriorities, to the depths of existence as lived and experienced by man, every man. At this point the emotionally cautious voice of the first book has reached the level of a primal scream. Even though the writing is done in the first person singular, and in many cases the second person is dominant, there is a certain basic feeling of oneness that insinuates the possibility of the speaker being just that—humanness, or the reader's deeper self. This being the case, the next step in this voyage through man's essence is totally acceptable: the voice belongs now to an entranced speaker, to an individual who has been, or still is, in contact with those levels of reality that only a sibyl is allowed to reach and make known to the rest of men—a sibyl or a seer.

La destrucción el amor has been one of the books preferred by critics because in it the poet's conception of reality is clearly stated and wonderfully expressed in poetic language. What has been termed the personal view of Aleixandre in this epoch of his life is nothing more than the coherent manifestation of a surrealistic conception made less illogical by the ordering capacity of the creative poetic mind. Aleixandre has conceived a metaphorical world, a pure literary construction, to make visible his own interpretative vision of man in nature. Obviously, due to the more controlled will to formulate an expressive metaphor, the book has a clearer and more logical structure than the two previous ones. The collection has been conceived as a totality, each poem being only part of the continuous flow of a slow-paced discourse, made rhythmically solemn by the use of long versicles. The tone is almost sacred, but the images gain in clarity: Aleixandre is moving toward a more easily understandable lyric language. His world of primitive nature and dream-like situations is still reminiscent of Pasión de la tierra, but the new form of expression does not only refer to the level of subconscious knowledge but also to the deeply felt desire for intelligible communication.

It was to take the poet several more years to reach that desirable communicative language; years and experiences that cannot be ignored when discussing the evolution of his work. [In his prologue to Aleixandre's Antología total] Pere Gimferrer finds the age of the author to be an important factor—maturity brings a more coherent and better articulated interpretation of one's own condition as a human being, thus making less difficult its communication through language. But age alone will not explain everything; the critic's comment, though, is well-founded and directs attention to the life of the poet, somewhat forgotten in the discussion of his works. By 1936, the beginning of the Civil War, Aleixandre was 38 years old and had lived through a dangerous illness. For ten years he had been facing the limitations of a sick man; life and death, pleasure and pain, desire and fear must have been for him realities much more evident than for any other poet of his age. The sick man is doubly man because he is much more aware of his biological condition; in his body he sees, better than any healthy person, the slow process of decay and dissolution, and his mind wanders with enhanced anguish through the different available explanations of human life and death.

In his first books Aleixandre expresses precisely that anguished human search for a meaning to existence. In Ambito, limited by the demands of an aesthetic formalism, the inspiring force is not yet free to look for its own form of expression, which comes only with surrealism in Pasióon de la tierra. Irrationalism is more a method than an objective, a poetic technique, not a rhetorical device. Confusion and chaos is the appropriate condition of a mind in a state of total uncertainty, but in the mass of images in the books considered to be properly surrealistic, one sees already the elements that in further developments will constitute a more logical, or logically understandable, message. At the beginning the poet himself does not know which elements those are, and only through the slow process of time does he come to have a more or less intelligible view of all creation. By then the poet is no longer young. Age means in his case having passed through the different stages of confusion to gain the conviction of a particular view, his own view.

With a more mature sense of his accomplishments, and conscious of the circumstances that surround him, in 1934 Aleixandre begins to write his fifth book, Mundo a solas, which he originally meant to entitle Destino del hombre. In a sense it is the first book that really develops what was set forth in the preceding one. Up to the time of the writing of La destructión o el amor the poet was not completely in control of his subject, he did not have a clear concept of the world he was singing about; images and words were used more as searching tools than as means of purposeful communication. In La destructión o el amor there is already a basic Weltanschauung from which the next book was to take its inspiration, focusing its interest on one aspect: man. This preference for the human aspect of creation was to become more important in the books written after the war. In pessimistic terms Mundo a solas talks about man's loss of his "primeval elemental state." Sad as it was, Aleixandre's vision of man as a fallen creature left his mind open to see the immediate circumstance of his world. It was in 1936, and the negative tones of his poetic vision were confirmed by the human violence of war.

During the violent years of the Civil War, Aleixandre did not write much. The book on which he had started to work in 1934 was finished in 1936, but adverse circumstances made its publication impossible. Instead, a few poems about war appeared in Republican literary magazines, never to be collected in any of his books. At the end of the war, the poet began to work on the first compositions of a new collection that would take him almost five years to complete. It was a time of sorrow and devastation. The war had taken most of what Aleixandre knew to be his world. His own house, half destroyed by the battle of Madrid, could very well symbolize the writer and his circumstances. The first moments of peace brought life back to the garden and rooms of the house which had been abandoned during the hostilities. But many friends of the pre-war years were gone: the most loved, Federico Garcia Lorca, was dead; Cernuda, Guillén, Neruda, and others had left the country; Miguel Hernández, the youngest one, was dying in one of Franco's prisons. While their memories lingered in the renovated house, a new group started to replace them around the poet; it was not a generational group, not a school following the dictates of its leader, but the first members of an ever-growing group formed by most of the new Spanish poets who saw in Aleixandre the inspiring and most needed figure of the master. From that time, the poet accepted the responsibility of becoming a central figure in post-Civil-War Spanish literary life, and his house became the meeting place for everyone who was interested in poetry. The poet had reached maturity.

Coincidentally, in 1944 Aleixandre published his first book in almost ten years, Sombra del paraíso, a masterpiece which established without any doubt his reputation as the greatest poet of his generation living in Spain. In the midst of a literary scene filled with sonnets and other neoclassical "pastiches" inspired in a stale desire to believe in the reborn greatness of the Empire, the long versicles and sensuous images of Aleixandre's new book were the exception. Exceptional also was the world vision made concrete in the imagery of the poems. Conceived as a unity that took shape from the original inspiration of one poem, Sombra del paraíso continued, as is the case with almost every collection of Aleixandre's, the creative process developed in the previous books. Mundo a solas was still unpublished, and although it was not known by the public until 1950—when it appeared in a collector's edition—it has points of contact with Sombra del paraíso and should be taken into account as its immediate antecedent.

With Mundo a solas Aleixandre wanted to express his sad realization of man's fallen state; this idea, reminiscent of certain religious explanations of the apparent inadequacy of man in nature, is fully developed in Sombra del paraíso, as the title itself leads one to guess. But there are important differences between both books, differences which are made evident to the reader by the general tone of the voice in each collection. The first volume conveys a rather negative feeling of violent overtones, while the dominant tone in Sombra del paraíso leads to a more complex and richly sentimental feeling of human totality, or better stated, man's emotional being. For Pere Gimferrer this difference is indicative of two states in Aleixandre's understanding of reality. The first stage encompasses his first five books, which convey an idea of disorder and confusion; the poet's view is one of chaotic dispersion. The second stage, which begins with Sombra del paraíso, introduces a harmonious view of the universe. This change did not happen suddenly, nor did it come as a complete surprise—it is the sign of the writer's maturity. Essential to this new understanding of the relationship between man and the universe are Aleixandre's conceptions of poetry and the poet, although they are not much different from the ones he professed earlier in 1934.

In effect, the author's basic views in this matter had not changed. The only difference is to be found in the intensity of the conviction and its purposefulness. What a few years before had been a supposition and a desire was now an accepted fact, a definite ordering of the multiple components. Maturity is also responsible for this certainty about what to expect from poetry and its producer. The poet, for Aleixandre, continues to be viewed as a seer, as a man who can reveal to other men that ultimate knowledge of the otherwise inexpressible truth. In an image that says more than any abstruse explanation, the poet appears as a gigantic being whose feet are deep inside the earth and whose head is up above, touching the sky; his voice is that of mysterious forces. This figure cannot be more representative of a particular attitude toward poetry, and it explains in full the extent of Aleixandre's objectives in Sombra del paraíso.

It is only natural that the first reaction of the readers of this book was to compare it with a romantic work. Everything in it tends to underline emotion in its highest form; from the conception of poetry and the poet—developed in the first composition of the book—to the images and the versicles, Sombra del paraíso stands out as a document of man's eager acceptance of a degraded existence that is only a shadow of the original paradise. The speaker addresses nature, the cosmos, and other men as if he were indeed that gigantic poet of magnificent voice. Even those compositions in which the first-person speaker remembers—with the nostalgic tone of many of the poems—a past existence of paradisiacal beauty give an impression of a voice coming from a superior, or at least different, level of human consciousness; it is the voice of one possessed by a spirit of extreme sensitivity.

It is quite evident by this point in Aleixandre's literary career that his work has reached its originality by an unfailing and constant effort to relate poetry and the personal search for meaning; he has applied with all conviction the theory of poetic knowledge learned from surrealism and its predecessors. La destructión o el amor and Sombra del paraíso are two perfect examples of poetry understood as a vocation, as a form of consciousness—spiritual, intellectual, emotional, social—in a word, a form of total life. For Aleixandre there are no other activities or devotions besides poetry; everything in the poet's life depends on it and finds in it its meaning, as in the case of a religious person whose particular belief provides an order and meaning to all creation. For Aleixandre the "religious" conviction in poetry does not respond to an already provided answer—he went step by step in search of it, in a journey he describes metaphorically as "an aspiration toward light."