Vicente Aleixandre's ambivalence with regard to the relationship of his first book, Ámbito (1928), to his poetic creation as a whole, centers on his interpretation of this work as “traditional” (“A la segunda edición de La destrucción o el amor,” Obras 1442). According to Aleixandre, the “revolutionary” second work, Pasión de la tierra (written in 1928-29, published in Mexico in 1935), broke with the traditional, initiating a poetic evolution that left Ámbito behind and somewhat marginalized, that is, until the appearance of Sombra del paraíso (1944) (1442-44). Sombra del paraíso's reformulation of themes, structures and concerns first seen in Ámbito, confirmed, for the poet, the latter work's place within his poetic evolution and, at the same time, reconciled the revolutionary and the traditional: “… en poesía, … la línea revolucionaria, si de veras genuina, acaba mostrando ser, haber sido, la única línea tradicional” (1444).

Aleixandre's understanding of the evolutionary nature of his poetry, an evolution that began in a “violent rupture” (1461) with the existing literary aesthetic, corresponds to José Ortega y Gasset's theory of cultural evolution, articulated in La deshumanización del arte. Ortega's theory assumes that even the richest artistic vein will inevitably be exhausted, and that artists must periodically set out in new directions. It incorporates breaking with the “traditional” within the evolutionary process of a culture. For Ortega, interestingly enough, this break with the past can be observed precisely in the aesthetic current that Aleixandre would later term “traditional.” This aesthetic, exemplified in literature by pure poetry, was described by Ortega as “new” (3: 359) and “iconoclastic” (3: 377) in 1925. Viewed in light of Ortega's evolutionary theory of culture, Ámbito, like Pasión de la tierra, appears to have participated in a contemporary literary current that began by renouncing the aesthetic that preceded it. Just as the purist aesthetic turned away from the vestiges of nineteenth-century art forms (Deshumanización 3: 359), so too, did the “impure” current, including the neo-romantic and surrealist literature with which Pasión has been identified, break with pure poetry. In this sense, both Ámbito and Pasión de la tierra can be associated with movements that were “revolutionary” at first, but that were incorporated into tradition.

While Ámbito and Pasión de la tierra both indicate Aleixandre's adherence to the Orteguian maxim that the artist must accept “el imperativo de trabajo que la época … impone” (Deshumanización 3: 360), the two works contrast in the way in which they relate to their respective periods. Unlike Pasión de la tierra, a work in which Aleixandre embarked on a largely uncharted literary adventure, and which remained unpublished in Spain until 1946, Ámbito was born into an already well-defined poetic, artistic and intellectual context. Ámbito's identification with the literary current of pure poetry, and beyond it, with what Ortega called the “dehumanization of art,” may account, in part, for Aleixandre's recollection of the work as “traditional” (1461). What kind of “tradition” did pure poetry represent? What was the “imperative” that the times imposed on Vicente Aleixandre and other poets writing in the mid-1920s in Spain? I believe that in order to answer these questions we need to examine not only the aesthetic of pure poetry, but also the philosophical ideas that reinforced that aesthetic in Spain.

Ortega y Gasset's belief that the arts and “pure science” are the first cultural areas to manifest changes in “la sensibilidad colectiva” (3: 378) implies that philosophy occupies a place alongside the arts in the vanguard of cultural evolution.¹ Although Ortega does not pursue the question of a philosophical correspondence to the new aesthetic in La deshumanización del arte, his application of “unas gotas de fenomenología” (3: 360-63) to his study of the arts in the mid-1920s suggests the co-presence of phenomenology and pure poetry in Spanish intellectual life. I would propose, in fact, that phenomenology is the most likely philosophical counterpart of pure poetry and the other “dehumanized” art forms that Ortega describes. Ortega's vision of an intellectual climate in the 1920s, a climate conditioned by historical and biological processes, pre-disposes him and his followers to perceive parallels across the arts and sciences and even interrelationships among them, thus creating the potential for intertextuality between works of such distinct fields as philosophy and poetry. The suggestion of intertextuality can be observed in the writings of Ortega y Gasset and Fernando Vela as they comment on both poetry and philosophy, and also in the comparison of philosophical texts by Ortega with a poetic text by Aleixandre. Vicente Aleixandre's Ámbito, I propose, both exemplifies the purist ideal of an utterly poetic poetry, in many respects, yet also possesses a philosophical, and indeed, a phenomenological resonance.²

Vicente Aleixandre's Ámbito was critically received in Spain as a fine example of the “new” poetry of the 1920s. Juan Chabás, in his laudatory review of the work for the Revista de Occidente, includes Aleixandre among “esos cinco o seis poetas jóvenes que descienden en una línea más o menos directa de Juan Ramón Jiménez” (247). In addition to the “influencia esencial” of Juan Ramón, Chabás perceives in this initial Aleixandrian work “la influencia paralela del postsimbolismo francés, y nuestro siglo XVII andaluz” (247). Chabás' review suggests that Ámbito was written and received within a rich and complex literary atmosphere in which pure poetry enjoyed a prominent position. Critic Juan Cano corroborates the emergence of pure poetry in the second half of the 1920s as the predominant literary current that either appropriated or eclipsed elements from other literary sources (40).

Pure poetry was championed in Spain by Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose Segunda Antolojía, published in 1922, launched the purist movement in Spain. In his “Notas” at the end of the work, Juan Ramón exhibits an attitude toward his work that comes to characterize the Spanish purist aesthetic. He expresses the belief that the poet must demand of him/herself the same precision and “perfection” expected of a mathematician or scientist. “[E]l arte es ciencia,” he affirms. In assuming his artistic task, the Andalusian poet seeks to “reduce” his poetry to its “simplist” expression (“Lo conseguido con los menos elementos; es decir, lo neto, lo apuntado, lo sintético, lo justo” [322]). At the same time, “[lo] espontáneo” must be “sometid[o] a espurgo por la consciencia” (323). In effect, both simplicity and spontaneity are achieved in poetry through a rigorous process of refinement, according to Jiménez. Only in this way can they participate in the “perfection of form” at which the poet aims. Juan Ramón seeks in this perfection a transparency of form that allows the “content” to be perceived: “Perfección—sencillez, espontaneidad—de la forma, no es … sino aquella exactitud absoluta que la haga desaparecer, dejando existir sólo el contenido, ‘ser’ ella el contenido” (324).

Juan Ramón's poetic ideas were influential in the literary formation of the younger generation of writers, which included Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Vicente Aleixandre, among others. Outside Spain, Paul Valéry was, undoubtedly, the most authoritative model and theoretician of pure poetry. Valéry's cerebral style and emphasis on the transparency of form was admired by the younger Spanish poets, particularly by Jorge Guillén. The young Spanish poets also celebrated Stéphane Mallarmé as the originator of the literary current that culminated in pure poetry. In harmony with the purist aesthetic, the young Spanish writers developed a new appreciation of such “classical” poets as Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz and Luis de Góngora, in whose work they recognized “modern” poetic values. Their understanding of pure poetry was broad enough to allow them to incorporate vanguard elements from ultraism and cubism, as Juan Cano has shown (107-108). The purist aesthetic, therefore, for all its exclusivist rhetoric exhalting “the minority” and its emphasis on the elimination of non-poetic elements from the poem, actually allowed, and even encouraged, the poets of Aleixandre's generation to synthesize elements from a number of poetic as well as extra-literary sources. Under the aegis of pure poetry these young poets were able to discover their own contemporary values in classical Spanish poetry, to sense their belonging, as well, to the more recent symbolist poetic current, and to look beyond literature to art and music for inspiration and dialogue. In these ways, certainly, the poets who embraced pure poetry in the 1920s worked at cementing their ties to selected segments of the Spanish and European literary traditions.

How may we describe the purist aesthetic of the 1920s in Spain? According to Antonio Blanch, pure poetry is “sinónimo de poesía esencial, autónoma y absoluta” (12). The desire for “autonomy” can be seen in the purist aspiration to create an utterly poetic poetry, apart from the world of nature, although not in opposition to it. The pure poets engage in a metapoetic task as they constitute and describe the poetic world as a realm of essence. In order to portray essential reality, they must refine the word of natural human discourse until it becomes “the poetic word.” In doing so, Blanch declares, “someten la palabra a sucesivas purificaciones hasta hacerla expresar la esencia de la realidad” (12). This refinement of the individual word is sustained throughout the entire process of poetic creation, which “está orientado a la producción de unas formas artísticas específicas, purificadas de toda adherencia no poética” (12).

The intellectual nature of the poet's experience, another key aspect of pure poetry, manifests itself in a variety of ways. The poetic attitude is characterized by alertness and by a heightened self-consciousness in the poet's contemplation of the world. Although the subject's imagination clearly is central to the generation of the poetic images, the process of poetic creation features a prominent role for the poet's rational faculties, in ordering and evaluating his/her experience of the world. The pure poet demonstrates his/her intellectual virtuosity in the visualization of abstract ideas or qualities while he/she reduces material objects to a linear form. The primarily visual nature of the poet's perception of essence, usually portrayed as an intellectual and not merely sensorial experience, parallels the philosophical intuition of essence.

Although there were a number of philosophical currents being discussed in Spanish intellectual circles and fora at the time Aleixandre was writing Ámbito, phenomenology was the most prominent. Even for the majority of Spanish intellectuals, who had no first-hand knowledge of Edmund Husserl's writings, phenomenology possessed a recognizable profile in the world of Spanish letters. It was known as a “science of essences” that claimed to rescue idealism from the stigma of subjectivism with its theory of intentionality. The phenomenological method, which promised a new way of looking at objects (Ortega, Meditaciones 1: 318) and a clear vision of essence through the process of epoché or bracketing of non-essential aspects of the object, was also familiar, if not always well-understood.³

José Ortega y Gasset, the dominant figure in the Spanish intellectual life of the 1920s, began to adapt phenomenology to his own philosophical thought at least as early as 1914, with his Meditaciones del Quijote. This work reveals his knowledge of Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas, as well as with Max Scheler's transferral of the phenomenological method to the realm of values (Morón-Arroyo 143). While Ortega turned away from phenomenology as philosophy in the 1920s, he continued to apply phenomenology as method to his historical and cultural investigations, according to both Morón-Arroyo (208) and Philip Silver (91). Under Ortega's direction, the Revista de Occidente published a number of works by phenomenologists and about phenomenology in the 1920s. The Revista also published poems by Vicente Aleixandre and other young poets during the same years. It seems probable, as well, that Ortega's observation of the new tendencies in poetry, and the arts in general, shaped the development of his own aesthetic ideas. Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo affirms that Ortega's description of contemporary literature, music and art in La deshumanización del arte reveals a certain sympathy with the new aesthetic (Morón-Arroyo 374).

Ortega y Gasset's theory of culture, as expressed in La deshumanización del arte, assumes that the same phenomena may be manifested in the art and the science/philosophy of a given time (3: 378).⁴ This assumption may account for the fact that phenomenology and pure poetry, in particular, were perceived as participating in a common cultural tendency in the 1920s. Fernando Vela, for example, a prominent contributor to the Revista de Occidente in these years, portrays in his articles a European intellectual atmosphere in which philosophy and literature appear as parts of a broader intellectual reality. In “Sobre el problema de la filosofia,” Vela points out that the self-conscious nature of contemporary philosophy makes of it not only “una creación incesante destinada a proseguirse por los filósofos, sino, a su vez, un objeto de estudio para los filósofos, la reflexión de una reflexión, la meditación de una meditación, la destilación de un producto ya destilado.” In these circumstances, says Vela, philosophy exhibits “el síntoma de una época que poetiza sobre la poesía, critica la crítica, novela la novela, y en todo paraleliza los reflejos intelectuales hasta lo infinito” (54-55).⁵

The self-reflective nature of phenomenology and contemporary poetry leads, according to Vela, to attempts by philosophers and poets to define their respective “disciplines.” Vela's description of the question posed by phenomenology, “¿cómo puede constituirse una filosofía de las filosofias?” (1927: 55), echoes his formulation of the fundamental question of pure poetry in a previous article: “¿cómo es posible una poesía en nuestra época?” (“La poesía pura” 1926: 221). By the same token, the pure poets' tendency to distinguish between their poetic experiences and those of the quotidian world is modeled in contemporary philosophy (“ciencia”), as Ortega y Gasset recognizes:

… el poeta joven, cuando poetiza, se propone simplemente ser poeta. Ya veremos cómo todo el arte nuevo, coincidiendo en esto con la nueva ciencia, con la nueva política, con la nueva vida, en fin, repugna ante todo la confusión de fronteras. Es un síntoma de pulcritud mental querer que las fronteras entre las cosas estén bien demarcadas. Vida es una cosa, poesía es otra …

(Deshumanización 3: 371)

Fernando Vela's articles “Sobre el problema de la filosofía” and “La poesía pura” raise additional parallels between phenomenology and pure poetry. Vela emphasizes the scientific nature of Husserlian philosophy, calling it “la ciencia de las esencias y de las relaciones esenciales” (1927: 64), while in his article on pure poetry, he speaks of Paul Valéry's formulation of the poet's task in strikingly similar terms: “Aislar, definir la poesía pura, es lo mismo que definir la esencia de la poesía … No se apresa una esencia sin una ciencia de esencias” (1926: 222). Valéry's concern for the apprehension of essential relationships in poetic creation is similarly stressed (1926: 226-27). Fernando Vela's language does not create, but merely reflects, the similarity between the discourse of the pure poets and that of phenomenologists; in his Segunda antolojía, Juan Ramón Jiménez also refers to poetry as a “science,” while Ortega y Gasset speaks of phenomenology as a science dealing with essences (I 253). Furthermore, the essences sought by means of a poetic purification or by phenomenological clarification are each characterized by their “fullness,” according to Jiménez (5) and Husserl (328-29).

An additional implication to be found in Vela's articles is that the pure poets and the phenomenologists have analogous modes of conceptualizing their tasks and pursuing their goals. Each group must assume the task of “making evident” an essential reality (1926: 225; 1927: 65), while effectively removing themselves as “personalities” from their work (1926: 225; 1927: 62). Both phenomenology and pure poetry involve a process or method for arriving at essence, ideally characterized by its rigor and precision, as well as by its movement toward “clarification.”⁶ Vela also emphasizes the common tendency of phenomenology and pure poetry to employ scientific terminology in defining their tasks (1926: 234, 239; 1927: 61-62).⁷ The idea of excluding nonessential elements (“distilling” and “isolating” the essence from its adherents in pure poetry, or “reducing” the consciousness of an intended object to a “residue” [Kohak 48] in phenomenology) is borrowed from chemistry. Mathematics, and in particular, geometry, serve as models for Edmund Husserl's early conceptualization of phenomenology, as well as for the pure poet's desire for exactitude and his/her will to construct an essential reality. In addition, both pure poetry and phenomenology purport to offer an objective, and not merely subjective, knowledge. In both phenomenology and pure poetry, the subject's immediate experience is submitted to conscious reflection (Blanch 118; Kohak 115-116). Pure poetry, while lacking the explicitly stated theory of intentionality (Ortega, “Conciencia” 2: 62-63), is characterized by the assumption that “consciousness” implies the awareness of an intended object (Cano Ballesta 16-23). Husserl's emphasis on intuition as “seeing” an essence-idea (Ideas 1) is echoed in pure poetry's tendency to transform abstract ideas into concrete, visible objects. In their desire to pursue their respective tasks with methodological rigor and precision, and in the claim for philosophical and poetic knowledge to be objective and even empirical, phenomenologists and pure poets respond to the challenge posed by positivism.⁸

Ortega y Gasset's understanding of the “irreality” of the poetic and the philosophical realms establishes a common ground between pure poetry and phenomenology, in particular. Ortega emphasizes the non-real quality of contemporary art and poetry, exemplified by the artist's “voluntad de estilo” (Deshumanización III 368). “[E]stilizar es deformar lo real, desrealizar” (3: 368). On the one hand, the tendency of poets and artists to accentuate differences with “the real world” is shared by phenomenology, as we have already seen. On the other hand, Ortega suggests a more direct similarity between philosophy and poetry with regard to the idea of “irreality.” In his “Conciencia, objeto y las tres distancias de éste” (1915), Ortega establishes the validity of “irreal” things, such as the centaur, as objects of philosophical and psychological reflection. Here he admits the possibility of both the real and the non-real being objects of consciousness, recognizing in a subject's fantasy, just as in his/her perception, “modos diversos de llegar … al ser” (2: 62). In a later work, Ideas y creencias (1940), Ortega continues to insist that science and philosophy share with poetry a dependence on fantasy (5: 403). Ortega's vindication of the centaur (2: 61-62), his readiness to accept “irreal” things as objects of consciousness, and his argument, recognizing the role of fantasy in philosophical thinking all can be found in Edmund Husserl's Ideas.⁹

Vicente Aleixandre's prose piece, “Mundo poético” (1927), a contemporary of Ámbito, provides an example of how the discourses of poetry and philosophy in the 1920s may overlap. “Mundo poético” contains a number of images and ideas related to pure poetry. First, it represents the world as an ideal space, akin to that of mathematics (Blanch 151): “Tu mundo es geometría, poeta. Es una forma transparente, de aristas vivísimas …” (1647). This world's form is pure: well-defined, yet transparent. The description of a state of heightened awareness through which the poet may achieve a clear intuition of the essential world also characterizes pure poetry: “Tu flor no envenena ni adormece. ¡Qué alerta estoy oliéndola! Me sube hasta la frente, penetrante, e inunda de claridad todo su aspecto, lo registra hasta sus últimas iluminadas zonas. Es una embriaguez de serenidad, de conciencia, de intuida visión, de estado. Caminar por tu mundo no es trabajo, es placer inteligente” (164).

Even as Aleixandre's “Mundo poético” represents aspects of pure poetry, it exhibits signs of intertextuality with two works by Ortega y Gasset. Aleixandre's description of the pleasure afforded by the poetic experience replicates Ortega y Gasset's portrayal of the new aesthetic pleasure of the 1920s as a “placer inteligente” in La deshumanización del arte (3: 369). Other suggestions of intertextuality emerge from the juxtaposition of “Mundo poético” and Ortega's eulogy of Max Scheler, published in the Revista de Occidente in 1928. In his evaluation of Scheler's contribution to philosophy, Ortega portrays the German thinker as an “original” man, “Adán del nuevo Paraíso” (4: 510), who uses phenomenology's new way of looking at the world to search for essences: “Fácil es comprender la embriaguez del primero [Scheler] que usó esta nueva óptica. Todo en su derredor se henchía de sentido, todo era esencial, todo definible, de aristas inequívocas, todo diamante” (4: 510). Ortega praises Scheler's work for invariably expressing something “esencial, claro, evidente y, por tanto, hecho de luminosa serenidad” (4: 510-511). His only qualification of this praise recalls Aleixandre's choice of words in reference to the poet's task above: “Pero tenía que decir tantas serenidades, que se atropellaba, que iba dando tumbos, ebrio de claridades, beodo de evidencias, borracho de serenidad” (4: 511). Aleixandre's emphasis on luminosity and on the clarity of the poet's vision, his use of the word “aristas” to illuminate the transparency, yet the definition of the poetic space, and his combination of the state of inebriation with that of serenity all coincide with Ortega's evaluation of Scheler's phenomenological experience of the philosophical realm.

In these two texts, Ortega and Aleixandre also portray the world, viewed from the perspectives of phenomenology and pure poetry, in similar ways. With Husserlian phenomenology, says Ortega, “el mundo se cuajó y empezó a rezumar sentido por todos los poros. Los poros son las cosas, todas las cosas, las lejanas y solemnes, lo mismo que las humildes y más próximas … Cada una de estas cosas comenzó tranquila y resueltamente a ser lo que era” (4: 509-10). In Aleixandre's poetic world, as well, things possess their own being: “Parece como que todas las cosas tienen su luz en ellas y ellas se dan su aurora y su poniente. Su noche. De día ellas nacen. No nace el día. Nacen las cosas. Una asunción de formas nos dice que se ha hecho el día. La calidad de su materia es siempre comprobable. Hay una dureza en su constancia que las hace evidentes, heridoras” (1648). Aleixandre's concern for the essential “things” of the world, and on the clear evidence of their form and matter, parallels Ortega's description of the phenomenologist's search for essence and his confidence that this can be made evident. Moreover, the poet's belief that the essential things have “their light in them” suggests that they possess their own meaning or sense (“sentido”), as Ortega affirms. The apparent intertextuality between statements by Aleixandre and Ortega demonstrates that they, poet and philosopher, shared certain common concerns and a common “language” for those concerns.

Some of the ways in which Vicente Aleixandre's Ámbito belongs to the realm of pure poetry involve areas in which the purist aesthetic parallels phenomenology. There are several elements linking Vicente Aleixandre's Ámbito to pure poetry that also concord with aspects of phenomenology. These include, first, the conceptualization of the poet's experience of things as taking place in an intellectual space often represented as an area circumscribed by a horizon;¹⁰ the subject's experience in this poetic world is clearly self-reflective, even as he contemplates the things around him. Second, within this space the poet encounters things and beings as essence and as sense. Sight functions as a model for the intuition of essence. Third, the poet's tendency to capture things at clearly defined moments or from particular perspectives, especially as the things come into being or recreate themselves in the fullness of their being. These three aspects of Aleixandre's poetry, isolated in my description above, are intertwined in the poems that I discuss below.

In Ámbito, as the title suggests, the poet contemplates and explores the space that surrounds him. The “ambit” he describes often corresponds to that of nature, yet self-consciously distinguishes itself from nature. The appearance of “real worldliness” is created primarily through the constant interplay of space (often a land or seascape) and time (night and day). The poet avails himself of ideas borrowed from human perception of the world of nature, such as perspective, horizon, form, number, and time in his experience of the poetic world. His vision of this world, however, with its alteration of normal causality, its tendency to reduce sometimes massive material objects to mere lines and planes while endowing the abstract with corporality, and its interplay of presence and absence, calls attention to the “irreality” of this pure poetry.

The poem “Idea,” for example, evokes an immense seascape that illustrates the invisible internal process of poetic creation:

Hay un temblor de aguas en la frente.
Y va emergiendo, exacta,
la limpia imagen, pensamiento,
marino casco, barca.

[85]

The image's emergence from the (poet's) forehead, exactly formed, like the goddess Athena from the forehead of Zeus, stresses the intellectual aspect of poetic creation and suggests that this creation is independent of natural human generation. The image is identified with thought, reinforcing the ideal quality of the image, yet is identified, as well, with the “casco,” which elicits the double association with a cranium and with a boat. The horizontal expanse implied by the reference to the sea divides the poetic space into upper (aerial) and lower (submarine) realms. The being alternately portrayed as image/thought/head/boat appears to float on the surface of the water, while above, ideas appear in a flock, and below, a secret ship surges up from the depths of the sea.

Arriba ideas en bandada,
albeantes. Pero abajo la intacta
nave secreta surge,
de un fondo submarino
botado invento, gracia.

[85]

According to Aleixandre's depiction of poetic creation, the more cerebral image and ideas must be followed by “grace,” which acts as a dual force, incorporating the vital eros and the rational logos. This force appears to “impregnate,” in effect, the virginal ideas in order for the image to become word.

                    Un momento detiene [la nave secreta]
su firmeza balanceada
en la suave plenitud de la onda.
Polariza los hilos de los vientos
en su mástil agudo,
y los rasga
de un tirón violento, mar afuera,
inflamada de marcha,
de ciencia, de victoria.

[85]

Although Aleixandre inverts the Platonic identification of the sky with the masculine and that of the submarine with the feminine, he maintains a balance by situating the masculine force of “grace” within the “marina entraña” while placing the vaguely feminine “ideas” in the air, with the image floating on the surface of the water. The formulation of the singular “idea” suggested by the title of the poem is identified with the pronunciation of the poetic word, simultaneously articulated by the tongue and disarticulated from the world in which it had been submerged. The newly formed idea moves

                    Hasta el confin externo—lengua—,
cuchilla que la exime
de su marina entraña,
y del total paisaje, profundo y retrasado,
la desgarra.

[85]

In this poem Aleixandre evokes various elements of the Classical Hellenic tradition. He combines the Platonic dialectic of the rational and the non-rational with allusions to classical Greek myth and cosmovision, accentuates the Neoplatonic penchant for using the external world of nature as a model for the internal poetic world, and employs the vertical axis representing the Neoplatonic aspiration to rise to a higher level of being. He refashions these elements of the Idealist philosophical/literary tradition from his modern perspective, and uses them to project a meta-poetic vision of creation. At the same time, the process of making conscious the unconscious, of bringing a seemingly remote object from a non-rational state in which it is undifferentiated from its surroundings, into the light of clear reflection, in which it is distinct from its surroundings, parallels the clarification realized by phenomenology, as well.

In Ámbito the world is portrayed at certain well-defined moments, particularly at dawn or, at the opposite extreme, at sunset or twilight. Aleixandre also favors the experience of the night, as well as the fullness of midday, manifested in the poem “Viaje.” In this poem the subject is privileged to experience the day as a journey whose aerial movement through space seems to follow the arch of the sun:

Qué clara luz en la mañana dura!
Diligencias de tiempo impulsan lisas
mi cuerpo. El suelo plano
patina blanco despidiendo el bulto
mío, que sobrenada inmóvil hacia
nortes abiertos en redondo, azules.

[150]

The poet's experience of the fullness of the world and the accompanying images of the amplification of the world's limits recall Ortega y Gasset's association of plenitude with the image of an expanding horizon: “El horizonte es una línea biológica, un órgano viviente de nuestro ser; mientras gozamos de plenitud, el horizonte emigra, se dilata, ondula elástico casi al compás de nuestra respiración. En cambio, cuando el horizonte se fija es que se ha anquilosado y que nosotros ingresamos en la vejez” (III 367). In “Viaje” the poet experiences the expansion of the world as he follows the sun's trajectory. The poet's body, at first floating over the smooth plane of the earth, soon participates in the upward and (implicitly) northward movement of the sun until it reaches the zenith of midday, high above the land or water:

                    Esquirlas. Luz. ¡Oh mediodía
tirante! El bulto se alza a muelle comba
¿de agua?, de campo verde, alcores corvos
—sumo un momento, coronante, alegre,
casi azules las manos altas—…

[150]

The plenitude of the day seems to endow the poet with a special perception that allows him to experience the moment even as he looks back towards the east (“¡Qué oriente!”) and is aware of the “luces últimas” that await in the west. The day, meanwhile, continues its spiraling course:

Impasible insinúa hacia su norte
inqueridas espiras. Elementos
de aire, de sol, de cielo, rompedores
del orden pretendido, vierten fuera
accidentes, miradas, torpes lazos

[150-151]

The pouring out of “accidents,” “glances,” and “clumsy links” eliminates non-essential elements from the poetic atmosphere, and confirms the certainty and the evidence of the poet's and the day's destiny:

                                                  Voy
en bulto cierto, a firme lejanía,
disparado de líneas, bajo palmas
de cielo abierto empujadoras, agrias.
Si te acogen, ¡oh bulto!, con destino
evidencia de luces últimas, estática
plenitud de ondas altas, abrigante
voluta de la noche, rinde viaje
—¡calma!—sobre ti mismo y da tu giro
perfecto, entero, de la estela dura
eximido, difícil, que has vencido
flotadora y que resta inerme, sólida.

[151]

Aleixandre's visualization of the invisible, and his reduction of the poetic world to planes and lines, while celebrating the fullness of the experience of the day, in addition to his emphasis on the clarity and purity of the atmosphere and the certainty and evidence of his experience all correspond to Spanish pure poetry of the 1920s. At the same time, Edmund Husserl's dependence on “seeing” an idea or essence, his predilection, especially early in his philosophy, for geometrical concepts and language, his confidence in the certainty and the evidence of the phenomenological method, his epoché or bracketing of the non-essential, and his affirmation of the fullness of the clarified essence also parallel the purist qualities of Aleixandre's “Viaje.”

The promise and, indeed, the imminence of intuition of an essential landscape is manifested in “Campo.” Here the poet commands a panoramic view of the landscape. The distance between the poet and his object allows him to visualize things and beings within the totality suggested by the title, Ámbito. The poet's contemplation of the countryside becomes a reflection on the nature of perception and knowledge:

Mañana vieja. Filosofía. Nueva
mirada hacia el cielo
viejo.
Con mi mano los hilos recogidos
a un punto nuevo,
exacto, verdadero.
Campo, ¿Qué espero?
                    Definición que aguardo
de todo lo disperso.
Suprema vibración de los hilos
finos, en el viento
atados a mi frente,
sonora en el silencio.

[137]

The poet has gathered a multitude of threads leading from “all dispersed things” to a central point described as “new, exact, true.” The threads trace the poet's line of vision to the objects in the distance and also suggest a return movement of the objects to the poet's forehead. A tension is created by the poet's expectation of a definition of the dispersed objects in terms of their form and meaning.

The discovery of essence, a concern shared by pure poetry and phenomenology, becomes explicit in “Retrato,” a poem that complements and seems to complete “Campo.” “Retrato” records the experience of a young man, the poet, who is privileged to see “the essence of things … become concrete … in his hands,” as he contemplates a landscape:

Este muchacho ha visto
la esencia de las cosas,
una tarde, entre sus manos
concretarse.
.....                    Sus ojos copian tierra
y viento y agua, que devuelven,
precisos, campo al reflejarse.

[96]

Once again, the poet is situated high above a landscape which he both contemplates and constitutes. The poet's vision perceives or “copies” the objects, “land,” “wind,” and “water,” which are returned to their place of origin transformed into “field” or “countryside.” The poet's utterance, pronouncing the sense of the object of contemplation, presides over the field:

                    Su lengua—sal y carne—
dice y calla.
La frase se dilata,
en ámbito se expande
y cierra ya el sentido, allá en lo alto
—terraza de su frente—,
sobre el vivaz paisaje.

[96]

This poem portrays the circular poetic process of perception, understanding, and creation of an object. “Retrato,” like “Viaje,” shares with phenomenology the use of a special seeing of essential reality that seeks to uncover the sense of that reality.

Finally, Aleixandre's preference for moments that become transparent as a process of creation (“Idea”), of understanding (“Retrato”), or as the self-conscious approximation to the fullness of being (“Viaje”) place him squarely within the purist aesthetic, but also in line with phenomenology. The suggested movement, often from obscure depths to the surface, from an undifferentiated background to the clear definition of objects in a landscape, and often from the darkness of night to the light of day (“Luz,” “Voces,” “Alba”) has been called the “clarification of the creative consciousness” by Gustavo Correa (43). While Correa traces this clarification to Mallarmé (43), in the poetic realm, I believe that such a process, concerned with the portrayal of essential things that manifest themselves as meaning and equally concerned, self-consciously, with the way in which the subject apprehends reality, can be found also in phenomenology.

It seems clear that as Ámbito conforms to the purist aesthetic, it also manifests certain parallels with phenomenology. In doing so, Ámbito is not unique, but demonstrates that pure poets and phenomenologists shared similar values, objectives and even theoretical models. In some respects, it is necessary to “bracket” the facts of Aleixandre's early break with pure poetry, his long-maintained inconformity with its minority aesthetic, and his recollection of his first work as “traditional,” in order to focus on Ámbito's place within the literary and intellectual reality in which it was written. Ámbito's primary relationship to pure poetry, but also its link to phenomenology, in addition to the parallels between pure poetry and phenomenology, indicate that the intellectual reality to which Ámbito belongs may be broader and more interrelated than critics have recognized heretofore.

Notes

1. The context in which Ortega invokes the “ciencia pura” suggests that the term includes philosophy:

   … he indicado que el arte y la ciencia pura, precisamente por ser las actividades más libres, menos estrechamente sometidas a las condiciones sociales de cada época, son los primeros hechos donde puede vislumbrarse cualquier cambio de la sensibilidad colectiva. Si el hombre modifica su actitud radical ante la vida comenzará por manifestar el nuevo temperamento en la creación artística y en sus emanacíones ideológicas (my emphasis)

   (Deshumanización 3: 378)

   Ortega's writing generally stresses the linkage of philosophy and science. In Meditaciones del Quijote (1914), he equates philosophy with science (1: 318), while in “Pleamar filosófica” (1925) (3: 344), he stresses the return of “science” to philosophy.

2. Dionisio Cañas traces Claudio Rodríguez's concern for “the things themselves” to Husserlian phenomenology:

   Husserl había hecho su emblema filosófico de esta frase: ¡A las cosas mismas! La fenomenología intentará volver a descubrir la cosa en sí, en su estar siendo, en su participar del ser del mundo -lugar del gran encuentro de todo ser, incluyendo, claro está, el del hombre. Esta certeza hacia el ser del mundo repercutió, directa o indirectamente, en la poesía, dándole, independientemente de los contextos histórico-sociales de cada país o cultura, una vitalidad universal al pensamiento poético.

   (87)

   I suggest that the phenomenology's “point and time of entry” into the Spanish poetic realm may have coincided with the development of pure poetry in the 1920s. Vicente Aleixandre, a mentor of younger poets like Claudio Rodríguez, may have mediated, to some extent, in the transmission of phenomenological elements to Rodríguez.

3. In a manuscript unpublished until 1990, Ortega y Gasset complains that Eugenio D'Ors critiques phenomenology, and particularly the phenomenological idea of consciousness, without understanding them (“Sobre la fenomenología” 14-28).

4. In La deshumanización del arte, Ortega sees in the new attitude toward art, “uno de los rasgos más generales en el nuevo modo de sentir la existencia: lo que he llamado tiempo hace el sentido deportivo y festival de la vida” (3: 194-95). In his article “Pleamar filosófica,” published the same year as Deshumanización, Ortega makes a similar statement regarding philosophy: “La nueva pleamar filosófica revela que un nuevo tipo de hombre inicia su dominación. Yo he procurado reiteradamente y desde distintas vertientes sugerir su perfil: es el hombre para quien la vida tiene un sentido deportivo y festivo” (3: 348).

5. Vela's article covers contemporary German philosophy in general, giving special importance to the thought of Husserl and Scheler, while reserving a place for Ortega y Gasset in a philosophical discourse dominated by phenomenology.

6. The phenomenological clarification is a complex process that requires the identification and bracketing of non-essential aspects of an object in order to allow the idea to manifest itself as essence. I do not wish to imply that the pure poets seek to perform a phenomenological “reduction” to essence in their poetry, but to suggest that the pure poetry and phenomenology, both conscious of belonging to the Western idealist tradition, describe their objectives and their methods for achieving those objectives in similar ways.

7. The enthusiasm for science was not limited to pure poetry alone, but was shared by cubism, futurism and later ultraism, as Juan Cano Ballesta affirms:

   El espíritu científico y la euforia industrializadora de la época impregnan a las letras de racionalidad. El escritor se mantiene alerta. Se entrega a la fría y matizada transcripción de los sentimientos más sutiles, pero trata de evitar que su personalidad invada torrencialmente el poema y lo haga rebosar de sentimientos, emociones, datos biográficos, puntos de vista, reacciones … incluso intenta ausentarse de él para que sólo quede limpia la palabra pregnante del sentido. Los manifiestos ultraistas hablan de distanciamiento sentimental frente a la obra, y hasta llegan a sugerir la total desaparición del artista.

   (107-108)

8. Erazim Kohák discusses Husserl's reaction to the empiricism of the positivists, which limited “experience” to that gained through sense perception (154-155). Ortega y Gasset also reviews phenomenology's opposition to the exclusive claims of positivism in his eulogy of Max Scheler (4: 508).

9. Husserl, like Ortega, uses the centaur to demonstrate the possibility that a fanciful construction may be a legitimate object of consciousness (Ideas 43). Husserl also affirms the validity of the “irreal,” which he considers independent of “matters of fact” (11), and declares the adequacy of fantasy for the intuition of essence (157-159).

10. While Edmund Husserl was primarily concerned with defining phenomenology's “field of experience” as separate from the ego's experience of the natural world, his references to the “horizon” of each experience (Ideas 51-55), his references to the ego's “perspective” on an intended object (Ideas 86-87), and his play with the idea of bringing remote or unclear objects into focus (Ideas 197) demonstrate that he depended on concepts taken from everyday perception of the natural world in order to describe that ideal space. Ortega y Gasset relates the image of the horizon, as the delimitation of the “world” to be viewed by philosophers and scientists, to his theory of perspectivism (El tema de nuestro tiempo 3: 202-203).

Works Cited

Aleixandre, Vicente. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1968.

Blanch, Antonio. La poesía pura española. Madrid: Gredos, 1976.

Cano Ballesta, Juan. Literatura y tecnología: las letras españolas ante la revolución industrial, 1900-1933. Madrid: Orígenes, 1972.

Cañas, Dionisio. Poesía y percepción. (Francisco Brines, Claudio Rodríguez y José Ángel Valente). Madrid: Hiperión, 1984.

Correa, Gustavo. “Conciencia poética y clarividencia.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 352-354 (1979): 41-74.

Chabás, Juan. “Vicente Aleixandre: Ámbito.” Revista de Occidente 21 (1928): 246-49.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Tr. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982.

Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Segunda antolojía poética (1898-1918). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1952.

Kohák, Erazim. Idea and Experience. Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology in “Ideas I”. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Ledesma Ramos, Ramiro. “La fenomenología en España.” La Gaceta Literaria 71 (1929): 467.

Metzger, Arnold. “La situación presente de la fenomenología.” Revista de Occidente 22 (1928): 177-201.

———. “La situación presente de la fenomenología.” Revista de Occidente 23 (1929): 178-209.

Morón-Arroyo, Ciriaco. El sistema de Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Alcalá, 1968.

Ortega y Gasset, José. “Conciencia, objeto y las tres distancias de éste.” Obras completas, 9 vols. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1963. 2: 61-66.

———. La deshumanización del arte e ideas sobre la novela. Obras completas 3: 353-386.

———. Ideas y creencias. Obras completas 5: 379-489.

———. “Max Scheler—Un embriagado en esencias (1874-1928).” Obras completas 4: 507-511.

———. Meditaciones del Quijote. Obras completas 3: 309-400.

———. “Sobre la fenomenología.” Revista de Occidente 108 (1990): 13-28.

———. El tema de nuestro tiempo. Obras completas 3: 143-203.

Silver, Philip. Ortega as Phenomenologist. The Genesis of “Meditations on Quixote.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Vela, Fernando. “La poesía pura.” Revista de Occidente 14 (1926): 217-40.

———. “Sobre el problema de la filosofía.” Revista de Occidente 15 (1927): 49-68.