Biography
Seville and early life
Cernuda was born in the Barrio Santa Cruz, Calle Conde de Tójar 6 (now Acetres),Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 11 in Seville in 1902, the son of a colonel in the Regiment of Engineers.Poesía completa: Cronología biográfica He had two older sisters. The recollections and impressions of childhood contained in his poems, and the prose poems collected in ''Ocnos'', suggest that he was always a solitary, introverted, and timid child whose unhappiness in the family led to his living vicariously through books and through his strong visual impressions of his native city.Connell p 201 His first encounter with poetry came at the age of 9 when he glanced through a copy of Bécquer's ''Rimas'' that had been lent to his sisters by their cousins Luisa and Brígida de la Sota.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 625 Despite the fact that he later testified that this left no more than a dormant impression upon him, he began to write poetry himself during his studies at the Escolapios School in Seville from 1915 to 1919 around the age of 14.hispanicexile.bham.ac.uk/people/51 In 1914, the family moved into the Engineers' Barracks in the Prado, on the outskirts of Seville. In 1918, they moved to Calle del Aire, where he would later write the poems of ''Perfil del aire''. In 1919 he began to study Law at the University of Seville, where, during his first year, he attended classes in Spanish Language and Literature given by Pedro Salinas. His extreme shyness prevented him from mentioning his literary activities until Salinas' notice was caught by a prose poem published in a student magazine. He gave Cernuda encouragement and urged him to read both classical Spanish poetry and modern French literature.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 627 It was at Salinas' suggestion that Cernuda sent his first collection of poetry, ''Perfil del aire'', toMadrid and France
His mother died in July 1928 and, at the start of September, Cernuda left Seville.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 632 He spent a few days in Málaga with Altolaguirre, Prados and José María Hinojosa before moving to Madrid. Although he had a law degree, he had no intention of making practical use of it. He was starting to realise that poetry was the only thing that really mattered to him.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 633 He renewed acquaintance with Pedro Salinas and met Vicente Aleixandre. Salinas arranged for him to become the Spanish ''lector'' at the University of Toulouse. He took up post in November and stayed there for an academic year. The experience of living on his own in a foreign city led him to a crucial realisation about himself: his almost crippling shyness, his unhappiness in a family setting, his sense of isolation from the rest of humanity, had all been symptoms of a latent homosexuality which now manifested itself and which he accepted, in a spirit of defiance. This led to a decisive change in the type of poetry he wrote. He also discovered a love of jazz and films, which seems to have activated an interest in the USA.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 636 Between his return from Toulouse in June 1929 to 1936, Cernuda lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital. At the start of 1930, he found a job in a bookshop owned by León Sánchez Cuesta. All through this period, he worked with many organisations attempting to create a more liberal and tolerant Spain. For example, between 1932 and 1935, he participated in the ''Misiones Pedagógicas'' - a cultural outreach organisation set up by the Spanish Republic. He also contributed articles to radical journals such as ''Spanish Civil War
When theExile in Britain
In 1935 at a salon hosted by Carlos Morla Lynch, a diplomat, diarist, amateur musician and closet homosexual working in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, Cernuda met an English poet called Stanley Richardson, nine years younger than him, who was making a brief visit to the country. He had already met Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez in London. They enjoyed some kind of intense but short-lived relationship, commemorated in a poem dated 20–22 March 1935 and included in ''Invocaciones'', before Richardson returned home.Taravillo Años españoles p 315 In February 1938,Stanley Richardson and Spain Richardson arranged for him to give a series of lectures in Oxford and Cambridge. At the time, Cernuda thought that he would be away from Spain for one or two months, however this was to be the start of an exile that would last for the rest of his life. The lectures never took place. Richardson was well-connected, however, and arranged a party for him, attended by celebrities such as the Duchess of Atholl,US and Mexico
Although he was happy in Mount Holyoke, at the end of the 1947-48 year, a student advised him not to stay there and he himself began to wonder whether it was a beneficial force on his poetry.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 655 In the summer of 1949 he paid his first visit to Mexico and was so impressed that Mount Holyoke began to seem irksome. This can be seen in the collection of prose ''Variaciones sobre tema mexicano'', which he wrote in the winter of 1949-50. He began to spend his summers in Mexico and in 1951, during a 6-month sabbatical, he met X (identified by Cernuda only as Salvador), the inspiration for "Poemas para un cuerpo", which he started to write at that time.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 656 This was probably the happiest period of his life. Scarcely had he met X than his Mexican visa expired and he returned to the US via Cuba. It became impossible for him to continue living in Mount Holyoke: the long winter months, the lack of sun, the snow all served to depress him. On his return from vacation in 1952, he resigned from his post, giving up a worthy position, a decent salary, and life in a friendly and welcoming country that offered him a comfortable and convenient lifestyle. He had always had a restless temperament, a desire to travel to new places. Only love had the power to overcome this need and make him feel at home in a place, to overcome his sense of isolation. In this, there is perhaps a clue as to one of the reasons that he was attracted to the surrealists - the belief in the overwhelming power of love. In addition, he always had a powerful attraction to beautiful young men.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 659 He also had a constant urge to go against the grain of any society in which he found himself. This helped him not to fall into provincial ways during his youth in Seville, whose inhabitants thought they were living at the centre of the world rather than in a provincial capital. It also helped to immunise him against the airs and graces of Madrid or any other place in which he lived. In November 1952, he settled in MexicoCernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 660 with his old friends Concha Méndez and Altolaguire(although since they had separated in 1944 and later divorced, Cernuda probably stayed with Concha). Between 1954 and 1960 he was a lecturer at thePoetry
Luis Cernuda was one of the most dedicated poets amongst the members of the Generation of 1927.Connell p 202 Salinas, Guillén, Diego and Dámaso Alonso were as well known for their teaching activities and their critical writings as for their poetry. Altolaguirre and Prados are probably remembered more for their printing work than for their literary output. Alberti enjoyed fame for his political activism and Lorca was possibly as gifted in drama and music as he was in poetry. Cernuda drifted into university teaching simply as a way of earning a living and never held a prestigious post. Everything in his life was incidental to his work as a poet. His published criticism is valuable for the insights it gives into his development as a poet - he tends to discuss the authors and works that had most influence on his poetry and thinking. The development of his poetry from first to last is dictated by the development of his character and not by literary fashion - although his personal crisis, depicted in ''Un río, un amor'', does coincide with the personal crises experienced by Alberti, Lorca and Aleixandre. The collective title he chose for his poetry, ''La realidad y el deseo'', refers to the conflict that is its primary theme. He wrote:Desire led me towards the reality that offered itself to my eyes as if only through possession of it might I be able to achieve certainty about my own life. But since I have only ever achieved a precarious grip on it, there comes the opposite tendency, that of hostility to the ironic attractiveness of reality...And so, in my view, the essence of the problem of poetry is the conflict between reality and desire, between appearance and truth, permitting us to achieve some glimpse of the complete image of the world that we do not know.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Palabras antes de una lectura p 602A significant stage of his development occurred in 1923-24, when he was doing military service. Every afternoon, along with the other recruits, he had to ride round the outskirts of Seville. One afternoon, he had an epiphanic experience as if he were seeing things for the first time. He also felt an uncontrollable need to describe this experience. This led to the writing of a whole series of poems which have not survived.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 626 Another crucial phase of his development was his residence in Great Britain between 1938 and 1947. He learned English and read widely in English literature. He seems to have had a sense that he was predestined to read English poetry and that it corrected and completed something that was lacking both in his poetry and in himself. He began to see his work in the classroom as analogous to the writing of poetry - the poet should not simply try to communicate the effect of an experience but to direct the reader to retrace the process by which the poet had come to experience what he is writing about. His attitude to Britain was ambivalent. He learned a lot from the literature and greatly admired certain aspects of the national character, as displayed in wartime, but found it hard to summon up affection for the country and its people.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 649-50 He tried to sum up his ambivalent feelings in the poem "La partida", but he considered that he failed to do justice to the theme.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 653
Collections
Primeras poesías (1924–1927)
This was the title that Cernuda gave in ''La realidad y el deseo'' to the revised version of his first published work ''Perfil del aire'', which had been published by ''Litoral'' in April 1927. The collection was dedicated to Salinas, and Cernuda sent a copy to him in Madrid, where he was spending the university vacation. Cernuda later recalled that this book was greeted by a stream of hostile reviews that tended to concentrate on a perceived lack of novelty and on its indebtedness to Guillén. It also really stung him that Salinas merely sent back a brief acknowledgement of receipt of the book.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 629 He dealt with the apparent debt to Guillén in an open letter published in ''Ínsula'' in 1948, in which he points out that in 1927 Guillén had yet to publish a collection. During the 1920s, Guillén had published individual poems in various magazines - including 12 in two separate editions of the ''Revista de Occidente'' in 1924 and 1925 - but, he argues, this is scarcely sufficient evidence to demonstrate significant influence, given that in December 1925 he himself had had 9 poems published in ''Revista de Occidente''. His conclusion is that both of them shared an interest in pure poetry and were influenced by the works of Mallarmé - in the case of Guillén this influence was transmitted via Valéry.Cernuda OCP vol 1 El crítico, el amigo y el poeta p 607-624 Villena, writing in 1984, sees these poems as the result of the spread in the 1920s of the ideal of "pure poetry" as espoused by figures such as Valéry, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega y Gasset in his influential essay ''La deshumanización del arte''. The young poets of the era, including Guillén, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Prados, Lorca and Cernuda, were all influenced by this blend of classical purity and refined playfulness and Guillén was the ring-leader. It was not so much a case of influence as a common, shared aesthetic.Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 14 The reviews were not all hostile.Egloga, Elegía, Oda (1927–1928)
After the set-back of the critical reception of ''Perfil del aire'', Cernuda decided to cultivate precisely those things that had been criticised, especially the lack of novelty. He wrote an eclogue, heavily influenced by his favourite Spanish poet Garcilaso. This was published in the first issue of a magazine called ''Carmen'' and was received very favourably byUn río, un amor (1929)
Cernuda started work on this collection during his period in Toulouse. He visited Paris in the Easter vacation of 1929 and was bowled over by the museums and the book-stalls. He spent his days soaking up the sights. One day, back in Toulouse, he wrote "Remordimiento en traje de noche" and discovered a style that enabled him to express poetic needs that he had not been able to communicate up till then. He had not written any poetry since before his arrival in Toulouse in 1928 but he produced the first 3 poems of the new collection in quick succession. His dissatisfaction with the conventions of fashionable poetry had been freed by contact with surrealism. For Cernuda, surrealism was more than a literary phenomenon: it a was the expression of an attitude against conformity.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 634 The poems in this collection break with the concept of pure poetry. He retains the precision and elegance of his language but infuses it with more passion and intensity.Villena: intro to Las nubes p 19 He continued work on this collection after his return to Madrid. The influence of the Surrealists is shown by the complexity of the free-flowing imagery, some of it inspired by random discoveries such as the title of a jazz record (as a jazz fan, he used to scour record catalogues and was intrigued by titles such as "I want to be alone in the South"), the name of an American city such as Durango or Daytona, a title card from a silent film, or an image from a talking picture such as White Shadows in the South Seas which he had seen in Paris. The metrical schemes and rhyme patterns of the first two collections are largely abandoned. This was the first collection in which he made use of what he calls free verse. In reality, this amounts to ignoring classical Spanish verse forms and rhyme schemes, such as ''letrillas'' - in fact, from this point on Cernuda rarely uses full rhyme or even assonance - even though he often felt a need to write in a lyrical style.Cernuda. OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 635 A few of the poems in this book are written in alexandrine quatrains and most have some kind of metrical pattern, which makes them unusual in the context of the Surrealist movement.Connell p 204 In a poem such as "¿Son todos felices?", Cernuda makes it clear what attracted him to the Surrealists, their protest against society and the pressure to conform. In this poem, honour, patriotism and duty are seen as worthless in comparison to the suffering they inflict on the rebel or non-conformist. Just being alive and living according to the rules is equivalent to being dead. It is noteworthy that this poem contains the first unequivocal expression of homoerotic attraction in his poetry.Harris notes to Un río, un amor p 82 The collection, like its successor, remained unpublished until 1936, when they were gathered into the first edition of ''La realidad y el deseo''.Los placeres prohibidos (1931)
The poems gathered in this and the previous collection came to Cernuda fully formed. The poems that eventually got published were the same as the first drafts, which was very different from his experience with his first two collections.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 637 It is a book of love, rebellion and beauty. The poet's homosexuality is made defiantly manifest in this collection. However, the title of the work suggests that there were other "forbidden pleasures" and he explores various ways of defying the norms of bourgeois behaviour. It is the product of an intensive period of literary production between April and June 1931, when Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.Harris notes to Un río etc p 85 In "Diré cómo nacisteis", Cernuda launches a war cry against a society in decay that represses and imprisons people who transgress the social norms of love. And in the next poem, "Telarañas cuelgan de la razón", he sets up the other major mood of the collection, an elegiac mood of sorrow.Harris notes to Un río etc p 89 The poems in this book draw a distinction between the poet's freedom of imagination and the accepted rules of life that confine and limit his freedom.Connell p 205 The predominant tone is one of desolation, recalling the transitory nature of love and the emptiness it leaves in its wake. In "De qué país", Cernuda looks at a newborn child and depicts the betrayal of his sense of wonder and innocence by the way the adult world imposes artificial codes of behaviour and a sense of guilt when the code is transgressed. It is a theme that is explored many times in his oeuvre.Donde habite el olvido (1932–1933)
This book resulted from a love affair that ended badly. When the collection was first published, by the ''Signo'' publishing house, nobody noticed the significance of a large "S" in the form of a snake on the inside back cover.Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 303 Derek Harris identified the other man as Serafín Fernández Ferro a young man from a poor family inInvocaciones (1934–1935)
This collection was originally called ''Invocaciones a las gracias del mundo'' but Cernuda later shortened it to make it seem less pompous. Tired with the habitual brevity of poems in the tradition ofLas nubes (1937–1940)
This collection was written during the Spanish Civil War and amidst all the disruption and uncertainty in Cernuda's life as he went into exile, drifting from Madrid, to London, to Paris, to Cranleigh and finally to Glasgow. It is a book about war and exile and how both of these connect with Spain. It is his most Spanish collection a nd a pivotal collection in his output.Villena: intro to Las nubes p 27 Meditations about his isolation in foreign countries and about Spain, particularly about his growing feeling that nothing in Spain was going to change for the better and that intolerance, ignorance and superstition were winning the struggle, are the major themes. There is a dichotomy in the way he views Spain. On the one hand is Spain the stepmother of whom he is ashamed, stuck in the past, jealous, intolerant, violent and now wrecked by war, as depicted in "Elegía española I". On the other hand is an idealised version of Spain, now destroyed, to which Cernuda feels allegiance. It is a mix of a lost Eden of the south (the Spain of his Andalusian background), a tolerant, creative, great and respected nation and of the most positive and creative aspects of Golden Age Spain. This Spain is depicted in "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra", "Elegía española II" and other poems.Villena: intro to Las nubes p 28-29 Exile is a theme that Cernuda will keep developing for the rest of his poetic career. Physical exile reminds the poet that he is also a spiritual exile in the world, a cursed figure because every poet belongs to a purer realm of experience, as he had already started to write about in ''Invocaciones''.Villena: intro to Las nubes p 29 "Scherzo para un elfo" and "Gaviotas en el parque" are just two of the explorations of this theme Stylistically, there is an increased concentration on clarity and simplicity of diction and his control over his means of expression is growing. He often uses combinations of 7 and 11 syllable lines, the basic form of the ''silva'', a very important form for poets of both theComo quien espera el alba (1941–1944)
This work was begun during his 1941 vacation in Oxford, continued in Glasgow and completed at Cambridge in 1944. The autumn, winter and spring of 1941-2 was one of the most fertile periods of his life and it seems that this collection was one of his favourites. He read widely in English poetry and criticism and made acquaintance with the writings of TS Eliot, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Keats's letters amongst others. He also began to read Goethe and Kierkegaard. Whilst this extensive reading does not show through specifically in any poem, his handling of longer poems is more assured. There are poems that suggest a nostalgia for the Seville of his youth - not an emotion that Cernuda often displays, but a longing for bright sunshine and warmth is easily explicable in the circumstances. It is only in such indirect ways that a reader can sense what was happening around him. Glasgow was bombed 5 times by theThe title of the collection alludes to the atmosphere of Britain during the Second World War when "it was only possible to hope for an end to the world's retreat into a primitive world of darkness and terror, in the middle of which England was like the ark in which Noah survived the flood."Ventaja grande es que esté ya muerto Y que de muerto cumpla los tres siglos, que así pueden Los descendientes mismos de quienes le insultaban Inclinarse a su nombre, dar premio al erudito, Sucesor del gusano, royendo su memoria. (it is a great advantage that he is now dead and that he lasted three centuries dead, for now the very descendants of those who insulted him may bow to his name, give a prize to the scholar, successor to the worm, gnawing away at his memory)
Vivir sin estar viviendo (1944–1949)
Begun in Cambridge, continued in London and completed in America, this is very similar to the previous collection in that it contains a mix of introspective and self-analytical works and shorter impressionist poems. As a result of his reading of Hölderlin, Cernuda had started to use enjambement. His increasing use of this device gave his poetry a duality of rhythm - the rhythm of the individual line and the rhythm of the phrase. Since he tended not to use rhyme or even assonance and was not very interested in writing poetry with a marked metrical pattern, the rhythm of the line tends to be swamped by that of the phrase, resulting in an effect that is often close to prose.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 650 It is a rhythm of ideas rather than a metrical rhythm. And yet, the influence of Hölderlin dates back to the period when he was writing ''Invocaciones'' in the mid-1930s, which gives a sense of how profound the influence was. The German poet gave him an example of "a poetic language using long sense periods in extensive poems that develop a theme in depth"Harris: Luis Cernuda A Study of the Poetry p 67 and over time the reader can see Cernuda absorbing and building on this example. The first eight poems were written in Cambridge and he added another 13 which he wrote during holidays in Cornwall. The title alludes to the state of mind in which he found himself at that time - living vicariously in foreign countries where he scarcely knew anybody. His voracious reading was taking the place of living. He could see nothing ahead of him but death. A typical poem from this collection is "El César", which is another use of the ''Doppelgänger'' motif. The aged Emperor Tiberius in retirement in his palace on Capri ponders his solitude and voluntary separation from the world and people. His feeling of misanthropy is almost idealised.Villena: intro to Las nubes p 37 He reflects on his power, his age, the blood he has shed, the rumours that circulate about him, his regrets and guilty feelings, what it is like to be an old man desirous of youthful flesh. It is a complex poem: Caesar is a projection of Cernuda's thoughts and yet he is also a figure in his own right, reflecting on his own life story.Con las horas contadas (1950–1956)
This collection was started in Mount Holyoke during the winter of 1950 and completed in Mexico. One of the most noteworthy things about this book is that it contains a group of 16 poems - "Poemas para un cuerpo" - about an intensely physical affair he had with an unidentified man in Mexico. The title of the collection suggests not merely Cernuda's obsession with the passing of time but also the sense of strangeness he felt whilst living this amorous adventure - an old man in love as he describes himself.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 658 As already stated, this was one of the happiest periods in his life. Some of the poems refer to the experiences he felt during the affair but the majority are reflections after the affair ended, attempts to explain and fix this experience of intense love. There are obvious parallels with ''Donde habite el olvido'' but these later poems are not bitter, resentful or disillusioned. Cernuda "is primarily concerned to investigate the relationship between himself and the experience of love, so much so in fact that the loved one has only a secondary importance in the poems".Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 140 However, he is, unlike Serafín Fernández Ferro or Stanley Richardson, present in the poems rather than a shadow or absence.Villena: intro to Las Nubes p 39 The poems lack sensuality. Poem "IV Sombra de mí", for example, "is a meditation on the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The loved one is again the visible image of the lover's desire but nonetheless necessary for without him love could not have been exteriorised."Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 143 What we get is a sense of the poet's gratitude for having been given the chance to experience love. It is interesting that although Cernuda later expressed his affection for these poems he acknowledges that they give cause to one of the most serious objections that can be made to his work: that he was not always able to maintain the distance between the man who suffers and the poet who creates. The bulk of the poems in the collection are shorter than in previous books and start to incorporate assonance more frequently in an attempt to concentrate the thematic material rather than explore it at length and also to seem more purely lyrical, even though these urges were not the result of a conscious decision. Among the other interesting poems is the one that opens the collection, "Aguila y rosa", a very sober, restrained account of the unfortunate marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor, and Philip's stay in Britain. At times, it could be that Cernuda is projecting his own feelings onto the king. Brief and ultimately tragic as their married life was, at least the love she experienced gave Mary some recompense for her unhappy life.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 138 With this poem, Cernuda completed a trilogy of works about Philip II. The first was "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra" in ''Las nubes'', followed by "Silla del rey" from ''Vivir sin estar viviendo''. Both of these poems evoke the building of the monastery-palace at El Escorial. In the first poem, the monastery becomes a symbol of the visionary, idealist, eternal Spain that Cernuda loved.Villena: notes to Las Nubes p 131 It is an image of beauty, the creation of a sensibility that despises the practical and is diametrically opposed to the utilitarian environment of Glasgow, the place where he lives in exile. The nightingale singing its song, just to please itself, is a symbol for Cernuda the poet and it becomes fused with his conception of El Escorial.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 100-101 "Silla del rey" depicts Philip watching the construction of his palace from his seat in the hills above. Cernuda takes as a starting point the king's thoughts of the building as the expression of his faith and centralising political ideas. This develops into a reflection on his work, time and society and leads to a declaration that he is creating a haven from the world, protected by spiritual power from temporal change. Reality and desire have become one. The king is an outlet for Cernuda himself.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 102 "El elegido" is an objective account of the choosing, preparation and killing of an Aztec sacrificial victim. It is recounted in very simple language but it clearly picks up on the thoughts behind the soliloquy in ''Invocaciones''. The poem presents an allegory of the choosing, beguilement and final destruction of the poet by life or the "daimonic" power.Desolación de la Quimera (1956–1962)
Cernuda's last book of poems is a summing up of his career. It was published in Mexico in November 1962. It mingles poems in the style of his first book with epigrammatic works and extended reveries in his mature style. In "Niño tras un cristal", he completes a cycle of poems about the unawareness and hope of a child before its corruption by the world - a theme present right from the start of his poetic career. In addition there are poems that are derived from song-titles or catch-phrases - "Otra vez, con sentimiento" - and historical poems about figures such as Mozart, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Keats, Goethe, Ludwig of Bavaria. There is also a poem about a painting byInfluences
It was at the urging of Pedro Salinas that Cernuda began to read classical Spanish poets such as Garcilaso,in itself an allusion to a sermon byThe loud lament of the disconsolate chimera
Poetics: the role of the poet and poetry
Cernuda's poetry shows a continual process of stripping away artifice and fashionable stylistic traits or mannerisms. This accounts in part for the abrupt changes in style and tone between various collections. He was also convinced that a poet needs to gain as much variety of experience and knowledge as possible, otherwise his work will be pallid and restricted. A poet's work should reflect his growth, his intellectual and emotional development. When he describes things, it is his individual perception of them that he is trying to convey, what they mean to him, rather than their objective existence. However, after his early collections, he rarely uses the first-person. He frequently tries to create a sense of distance from his poetry by using the "tú" form but the person he is addressing is usually himself. The effect of this is that much of his poetry seems to be a self-conscious interior monologue. In part, this is because he was always conscious of a difference between the Cernuda who lived and suffered and the Cernuda who wrote poetry. In part, it is also probably a result of his natural reticence and caution against disclosing too much of himself, despite the fact that personal history lies behind much of his output. Whereas Browning might use a figure such asTranslations
During the writing of ''Invocaciones'', he met the German philosopher and linguist Hans Gebser, who was living and working in Madrid in the Ministry of Education. This was at a time when Cernuda was beginning to become enthused by the poetry of Hölderlin and, with Gebser's help he began to translate selected poems. These appeared in ''Cruz y Raya'' in early 1936. Because his knowledge of German was rudimentary, he made an error in translating the final line of one of the poems. A second edition was published in Mexico in 1942 but, since Bergamín did not advise him of this and Cernuda himself was living in Scotland at the time, he was unable to correct this and other infelicities. Gebser himself, together with Roy Hewin Winstone, was compiling an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry translated into German and Cernuda tried to get him to exclude any poems by Guillén, Salinas or Dámaso Alonso, on the basis that they were teachers rather than poets. He only succeeded in getting Alonso excluded and the anthology was published in Berlin in 1936.Taravillo: Luis Cernuda anos espanoles p 313 In addition, he translated a set of 6 poems by Eluard, published in ''Litoral'' in 1929. In 1938, with the collaboration of Stanley Richardson, he translated 2 sonnets by Wordsworth which were published in ''Hora de España''. He also translated poems by Blake, Yeats and Keats, which were published in ''Romance'' in 1940. Three poems by Yeats, Browning and Marvell were included in the first volume of ''Poesía y literatura''.Works in Prose
Prose poems
Ocnos (1940-1956)
Cernuda did not enjoy his life in Glasgow. He felt exiled both from happiness and love and began to feel a yearning for his childhood days. He remembered the South as a lost paradise.Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 35 It was in 1940 that the contrasts between the sordid and ugly city of Glasgow where he was living and his childhood memories of Seville inspired him to start to write brief prose poems to try to exorcise the tensions building up inside him. As the collection built up, he cast about for a title, finally finding one that pleased him in a work by Goethe. Ocnos was a mythical Roman figure who twisted reeds into ropes only to discover that his donkey methodically ate them. Yet he persisted in his efforts in order to give himself something to do and perhaps learn something. It struck Cernuda that there was a fitting irony - the creator continually trying to create and the donkey symbolising time the destroyer, standing in the place of the reading public, an unwittingly destructive consumer. The first edition was published in London in 1942 and consisted of 31 pieces. Cernuda continued mining the seam of work that writing prose poetry opened up for him and brought out a second edition in Madrid in 1949, with 48 pieces. The first edition had focused solely on Cernuda's childhood and adolescence in Seville. In the second edition, he gave the pieces a biographical sequence and moved beyond his life in Seville. The final edition had 63 pieces and was published in Mexico in 1963.Luis Cernuda: Poesía completa Notes p823-826 The first group of poems overlapped with the writing of ''Como quien espera el alba'' and this was obviously one of those periods of inspired creativity, such as when he was writing "Un río, un amor" and ''Los placeres prohibidos''. Exploration of his formative years was becoming a major preoccupation and there are overlaps between his poems and prose poems. The clearest example is "Jardín antiguo", which is both the title of a poem in ''Las nubes'' and a prose poem in ''Ocnos''. Both are inspired by the gardens of the Alcázar of Seville. In the poem, an ageing man dreams of returning to the walled garden, with its fountain, lemon trees, magnolias and birdsong. He dreams of the return of youth with its pangs of desire, knowing full well that they will not come back. In ''Ocnos'' we get a more expansive description of the garden and at the same time a deeper reflection on his connection to that place, the sense of rapture that he felt as a boy there.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 91 It concludes with a statement of the gap between reality and desire:Más tarde habías de comprender que ni la acción ni el goce podrías vivirlos con la perfección que tenían en tus sueños al borde de la fuente. Y el día que comprendiste esa triste verdad, aunque estabas lejos y en tierra extraña, deseaste volver a aquel jardín y sentarte de nuevo al borde de la fuente, para soñar otra vez la juventud pasada. (Later you had to understand that neither action nor enjoyment could be lived with the perfection they had in your dreams at the edge of the fountain. And the day you understood that sad truth, even though you were far away and in a strange land, you wished to return to that garden and sit again on the edge of the fountain, to dream again of past youth.)John Taylor writes,"As ernudarecalls loci of ephemeral harmony, increases his knowledge and self-knowledge, and crafts his ruminations, he hints that these introspective and poetic labours are all in vain. The donkey is already chewing the beautiful reed-woven rope."Taylor: Into the Heart of European Poetry p 18 While the predominant mood of the collection is sad, imbued with a sense of loss and nostalgia, there is also room for the occasional celebration as in "El estío" and "El amante", where he recalls the sensual delights of a holiday in Málaga in 1933, frolicking on the beach and in the sea, walking naked under his white robe with his friends and, in particular, his lover Gerardo Carmona.Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 277 Apart from the short-lived affairs with Serafín Fernández Ferro and Stanley Richardson, Carmona is the only other person we know about with whom Cernuda had a lasting affair in the 1930s.Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 303 Again, these prose poems share an affinity of mood and subject-matter with a poem written around the same time, "Elegía anticipada", included in ''Como quien espera el alba'', in which he declares that their love has broken out of the prisons of time. When his thoughts turn to Glasgow, in "Ciudad caledonia", he describes his hatred of the place, its monotony, vulgarity and ugliness and his dislike of the utilitarian, puritanical people. It was like a prison, useless in his life apart from work, parching and consuming what youthfulness he had left.Taylor: Into the Heart of European Poetry p 17 One prose poem, "Escrito en el agua" (Written in the water), was excluded from the second edition of ''Ocnos'' by the censors in Franco's Spain - presumably because it contains blasphemous ideas - "God does not exist." He had the reputation of holding Communist views, of being anti-Franco, of living a lifestyle and holding views repugnant to the regime - a homosexual who was anti-religion and anti-family values,Taravillo: Cernuda Años de exilio p 218 so his writings were always likely to come under close scrutiny from the censors. Cernuda himself decided not to include it in the third edition.Epistolario Letter to José Luis Cano June 1948 p 452 Taylor points out that the title is a translation of Keats's epitaph, "Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water". Cernuda had come to think it was too rhetorical in tone. It is another account of the destructiveness of time and how reality destroys all hopes and dreams. There is also an extended meditation in "El acorde" on his conception of cosmic harmony, a unity of feeling and consciousness that comes fleetingly, a moment of ecstasy. He calls it by the German word ''Gemüt'' and writes that the closest thing to it is "entering another body in the act of love nd thereby obtainingoneness with life by way of the lover's body."
Variaciones sobre tema mexicano (1950)
The first piece in this book is called "La lengua". Since his departure from Spain in February 1938, although he had been in contact with many Hispanic people, he had missed the sense of being surrounded by his native language. His visit to Mexico in the summer of 1949, the feeling of being in a Hispanic culture, the temperament of the people, the hot sun all seem to have kick-started his inspiration. These prose poems and his next collection of poetry, ''Con las horas contadas'', are the result.Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 38 He wrote these pieces in the course of 1950, once he was back at Mount Holyoke, and the collection was published in 1952. He sets the general theme in an introduction by discussing the lack of interest in Mexico shown by writers from peninsular Spain. As a child, he had no curiosity about the country. His curiosity was sparked by chance after his arrival in America. Curiosity turned into interest, which developed into love and this love is explored in these pieces.Luis Cernuda: Poesía completa p622 This is one of the sunniest, in all senses, of Cernuda's collections. Gone is the sad introspection of ''Ocnos''. In "Miravalle", he is enchanted by the viceroy's palace. If he were allowed to stay, he cannot imagine that he could tire of it or want to move elsewhere. In "Lo nuestro", the sight of native children begging reminds him of his homeland. His initial impulse is to return to the USA but, on further reflection, he comes to realise that this country is alive, in spite of its poverty. He reflects that perhaps poverty is the price you pay for being so alive. The USA seems vacuous and trivial in comparison. In "El mirador, he describes how the landscape, so similar to Spain, is taking control of him, exerting a spell over him, like it must have done over the conquistadors. "Perdiendo el tiempo" depicts a scene of indolent sensuality. "Ocio" is a reflection on the necessity of idleness. In "El patio", he feels as if he is back in the Seville of his childhood. He has finally managed to recover it. In "La posesión", he describes his urge to fuse with the land. In "Centro del hombre", he observes that the feeling of being a stranger, which had been a constant in his years of exile, has gone. He had been living with his body in one place and his soul in another. Now they are reunited:con todo o con casi todo concordabas, y las cosas, aire, luz, paisaje, criaturas, te eran amigas. (you agreed with everything or almost everything, and things, air, light, landscape, creatures, were friends with you.)However, these moments of harmony and union can only be fleeting - perfect shimmering moments, each of which is like a pearl between its two valves. On the plane back to the USA, he had to hide his tears and keep his feelings private. He then comments that this would add to the legend that has been created of his being dry and cold-hearted.
Short Stories and Drama
He published a set of three short stories - ''Tres narraciones'' - in Buenos Aires, 1948. The stories are: *"El Viento en la Colina", originally written in 1938, *"El Indolente", originally written in 1929, *"El Sarao", originally written in 1941-42. Two more stories appeared in ''Hora de España'', "En la costa de Santiniebla" (1937) and "Sombras en el salón" (1937). The latter depicts the atmosphere of Carlos Morla's ''tertulias'' in which "not only literary and aesthetic questions were debated but quarrels and affairs of the heart: love, disillusion, dislikes..."Taravillo: Años españoles p 253 It seems to be a fictionalised account of the breakdown of Cernuda's affair with Serafín Ferro. He completed one play - ''La familia interrumpida'' - in two acts in 1937-38. It was published posthumously in 1988. Before that, in 1931, he wrote 9 pages of an untitled play that he never completed. During his time in London, probably 1946, he began to translate Shakespeare'sCriticism
Cernuda wrote critical essays throughout his career, many of which were published in newspapers or magazines. Towards the end of his life, however, he brought out 4 collections of his most important pieces. The first was ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'' (Madrid 1957). The conception of this work probably dates back to the 1940s but he only began work on the articles that comprise it in 1954. Cernuda gives a survey of what seem to him to be the most important currents in Spanish poetry from the 19th century onwards. He deliberately omits any neo-Classical or Romantic poets and starts with Ramón de Campoamor. He also covers Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro before moving on to a general essay on " Modernismo and the Generation of 1898". This is followed by individual essays on Miguel de Unamuno, Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. He then moves on toCernuda and his contemporaries
Salinas and Guillén
He came to the attention of Pedro Salinas in his first year at Seville University - 1920-21 - and recorded, as late as 1958, that he would probably never have found his vocation as a poet had it not been for the older man's encouragement. However, his attitude towards Salinas seems to have been quite complex, as far as can be judged from his writings. In 1929 and 1930, his growing political militancy, inspired by his attraction to surrealism, made it difficult for him to tolerate friends whom he had come to consider bourgeois - such as Guillén, Salinas and even Aleixandre. Even though he might have reverted to friendly terms with Salinas and Guillén (and this was right at the start of his relationship with Aleixandre, when he viewed him as a comfortable bourgeois), in a collection of essays published in 1957, ''Estudios sobre Poesía española contemporánea'', it is possible to see that he continues to view them as adhering to a different conception of poetry. For Cernuda, a true poet has to break away from society in some way, even if he might live a lifestyle that looks totally conventional from the outside, and these two poets never managed to do that.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 196 He does not approve of the playful qualities in Salinas's poetry and his seeming refusal to deal with profound subjects.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 197 When he considers the change that came over Salinas's poetry with ''La voz a ti debida'', he dismisses it asjust another game, a desire to show that he was as human as the next man.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 199In truth, the poetry of Salinas was alien to Cernuda - so alien as to be antipathetic to him. His personal relationship with Salinas had probably never fully recovered from the blow of his apparent rejection of ''Perfil del aire'' in 1927. Not even his favourable review of the first edition of ''La realidad y el deseo'' seems to have appeased Cernuda for long. Salinas wrote an introduction to an anthology of Spanish poetry that was published in the 1940s and referred to Cernuda as ''el más Licenciado Vidriera de los poetas'', an allusion to the Cervantes short story '' El licenciado Vidriera'', in which the hero retreats timorously from life under the delusion that he is made of glass. In a poem called "Malentendu", included in ''Desolación de la Quimera'', Cernuda launches a bitter attack on a man who, he claims, consistently misunderstood and ill-treated him, alluding specifically to that description. His contacts with Guillén seem to have been more sporadic. Cernuda clearly valued his supportive words when ''Perfil del aire'' first appeared and he does not seem to have done anything to vex Cernuda. However the latter's assessment is based solely on the evidence of ''Cántico'' - the later collections had not begun to appear when Cernuda wrote about him. Clearly, the poet who wrote in "Beato sillón" that
has a different view of reality than Cernuda. Nevertheless, Cernuda respects his dedication to his poetry and his commitment to revising it and making it better. However, he does regret that Guillén should have expended so much care and energy on expounding such a limited view of life.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 203 He notes what he views as Guillén's tendency to draw everything he sees into a contained, bourgeois viewpoint.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 202 He also notes the way that when Guillén writes about Lorca, the latter's life and works become a personal affair of the Guillén family. His assessment ends in a contradictory way. He views Guiillén as a poet in the manner ofEl mundo está bien Hecho
Aleixandre
One of the first things that Cernuda did on arriving in Madrid in 1928 was to pay a visit to Vicente Aleixandre. This was their first meeting. However, they did not immediately become friends and Cernuda blames it on his own timidity and distrust.Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 201 He was struck by Aleixandre's warmth and friendliness, not realising until a later date that his visit had been during the hours when Aleixandre, for the sake of his health, would normally have been resting. Unfortunately he was also struck by Aleixandre's calmness and the sense of ease that he exuded at being in familiar surroundings. For Cernuda, who was always uneasy about feeling at home anywhere, this was a reason for deciding that he did not want to see Aleixandre again.Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 202 After his return to Madrid from Toulouse in June 1929, he met Aleixandre again: he recounts that it was Aleixandre who re-introduced himself to Cernuda as he himself did not recognise him. Gradually, over the course of many meetings, Cernuda's habitual reserve and distrust faded. His friendship with Vicente Aleixandre developed into the closest he had ever had. They often met in Aleixandre's house, sometimes with Lorca and Altolaguirre there as well. Aleixandre seems to have had a special gift for friendship, because he also became one of Lorca's closest friends (according to Ian Gibson).Gibson p 199 and Cernuda notes specifically his skill as an attentive and sympathetic listener. The implication is that he was trusted with the intimate confessions of many of his friends.Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 204 Cernuda also gives a very favourable account of Aleixandre's poetry in ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'', seeing in his work the struggle of a man of intense feeling trapped inside a sick body,Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Vicente Aleixandre p 228 an analogous situation to his own struggle for fulfilment. However, not even Aleixandre was able to escape from Cernuda's sensitivity about his future reputation. In the 1950s, he wrote a few essays on his memories of Cernuda, which of course were fixed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He describes his friend's apparent detachment from the world and unwillingness to engage. No attempt was made to see whether that old image still fitted the man who had gone through all the upheaval that Cernuda had experienced while going into exile. Perhaps more importantly, there was no attempt made to dissociate the poetry written by Cernuda, from Cernuda the man as Aleixandre had known him 20 years earlier.Harris A Study of the Poetry p11Lorca
Cernuda's relationship with Lorca was one of the most important in his life, notwithstanding the fact of its brevity. He first met Lorca in Seville in December 1927, during the celebrations in honour of Góngora. He recalled this meeting in an article he wrote in 1938.Cernuda OCP vol 2 Federico García Lorca (1938) p148-154 They met on the patio of a hotel in the evening. Cernuda was struck by the contrast between Lorca's large, eloquent, melancholy eyes and his thickset peasant's body. He was not favourably impressed by his theatrical manner and by the way he was surrounded by hangers-on - reminiscent of a matador. However, something drew them together: "Something that I hardly understood or did not wish to acknowledge began to unite us....he took me by the arm and we left the others." He next met Lorca three years later in Aleixandre's apartment in Madrid after Lorca's return from New York and Cuba. He noticed that something in Lorca had changed; he was less precious, less melancholy and more sensual. Considering the friendship between them and his admiration for Lorca, Cernuda is dispassionate in his assessments of Lorca's poetry. He is not a whole-hearted admirer of the ''Romancero gitano'', for example, unimpressed by the obscurity of the narratives in many of the individual poems and by the theatricality and outmoded costumbrismo of the collection as a whole.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Federico García Lorca p 210 When he discusses ''Canciones'', he deplores the jokiness of some of the poems -an attitude unworthy of a poet, but more appropriate to the son of a wealthy family who, comfortable in his very bourgeois status, is able to mock it, because he knows that it will not cost him anything and that it will earn him the reputation of being a smart, witty chap.He notes that this is a fleeting characteristic in Lorca but more persistent in someone such as Alberti.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Federico García Lorca p 210-211 For Cernuda, poetry is a serious business and he tends not to approve of people who take it lightly. It also tends to show how his criticism is guided by his own principles. He tends to be more lenient in his judgments of poets who are like him. He seems to approve of the fact that after the success of the ''Romancero gitano'', Lorca continued along his own track, not seduced into writing more gypsy ballads.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Federico García Lorca p 211 In ''Poeta en Nueva York'', a collection not published in Spain in Lorca's lifetime, Cernuda identifies the heart of the collection as the "Oda a Walt Whitman". This is interesting as it is a poem in which Lorca clearly shows his identification with homosexualsGibson p 297 but Cernuda's reference is rather obscure -
in it the poet gives voice to a feeling that was the very reason of his existence and work. Because of that it is a pity that this poem is so confused, in spite of its expressive force.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Federico García Lorca p 212On March 8, 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play ''Bodas de sangre''.Gibson p348 but he makes no reference to it, or indeed to any of Lorca's plays in his writings. He notes at the end of the chapter on Lorca in ''Estudios sobre Poesía española contemporánea'' that Lorca's later poems give clear signs to suggest that he had a lot more to say at the time of his death and that his style was developing in emotional force.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Federico García Lorca p 214 Cernuda wrote an elegy for Lorca which he included in ''Las nubes'' and to the end of his life took pains to try to ensure that the image of Lorca was not academicised, that he remained a figure of vitality, rebellion and nonconformism.
Dámaso Alonso
In 1948, Cernuda published an open letter to the famous critic Dámaso Alonso in reaction to an article by the latter titled ''Una generación poética (1920-36)''.Cernuda OCP vol 2 Carta abierta a Dámaso Alonso p 198-200 He takes exception to two passages: #Cernuda, at that time very young #Cernuda was still a boy, almost isolated in Seville, in the year of our excursion to Seville, the same year in which ''Perfil del aire'' appeared in Málaga, which neither represents his mature work.... He points out that he was 25 at this time, so can scarcely be considered "very young" or a "boy". As for his isolation in Seville, Alonso should recall that he had already had poems published in the ''Revista de Occidente'' and elsewhere. However, it is noteworthy that in his later essay, ''Historial de un libro'', he used the same expression to depict his sense of confusion at the hostile reviews to his first collection. He also criticises Alonso's use of the word "mature". He points out the essential inconsistency in saying that the poet was young and then expecting maturity in his early work. He then states that for him the key factor is not whether a poem is mature or not but whether it has artistic merit. He goes on to say that, even after the passage of time, he still prefers some of his earlier poems to certain poems written later. The major complaint he raises is that this critique is just a lazy repetition of the initial critical reaction in 1927. One of his key beliefs is that there are poets who find their audience at once and poets who have to wait for an audience to come to them - he reiterates this in ''Historial de un libro''. He is one of the latter. So when people like Alonso, who rejected his early work and still persist in calling it immature, now say he is a fine poet, he takes that to mean that they are merely picking up on the favourable reactions of people 20 years younger to his recent works - in other words, the audience that has found him - and that they are unable to see the continuities between the earlier and the later work. This develops into a key theme of Cernuda's final collection. In "Malentendu", he shows his unease that his own reputation could be shaped beyond the grave by the perceptions of someone such as Pedro Salinas and his reference to ''El Licenciado Vidriera''. In "Otra vez, con sentimiento", he shows the same unease on behalf of Lorca. Alonso had written in the same article (''Una generación poética (1920-36)'') a tribute to Lorca, calling him "my prince". Cernuda is keen to save his old friend from appropriation by reactionary forces, defending his unconventional lifestyle (homosexuality) and everything else about him that would prevent him from being free to live in Franco's Spain.Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 50Alberti and political commitment
Alberti was another of the people whom he met for the first time in the Góngora celebrations in Seville in 1927. Alberti describes him as "dark, thin, extremely refined and meticulous".Alberti p. 239 However, it is not likely that Alberti ever became close to Cernuda although the latter contributed to many of the former's journals during the early 1930s. Alberti invited him to contribute to the celebratory album that he was editingAlberti p. 242 but Cernuda did not follow it up. His relationship with Alberti is suggestive of the pathways along which his mind was moving after his initial contact with surrealism. In 1933, for example, he wrote for Alberti's magazine ''Octubre'' a piece called ''Los que se incorporan (Those who join up)''. In it he calls for the destruction of bourgeois society: "I trust in a revolution inspired by communism to achieve this".Cernuda OCP vol 2 Los que se incorporan p 63 In an article written for ''Hora de España'' in 1937, he wrote that: "the poet is inevitably a revolutionary... a revolutionary with full awareness of his responsibility".Cernuda OCP vol 2 Líneas sobre los poetas y para los poetas en los días actuales p 121 However, by that time, it seems clear that he did not expect poets to get directly involved in revolutionary actions. In an essay devoted to Aleixandre in 1950 he goes so far as to say that, for a poet to take the course of direct action "is absurd and tends to ruin the poet as a poet".Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 207 This attitude seems to colour his response to Alberti's poetic output. A key point in Cernuda's view of Alberti's poetry is that Alberti seemed to lack any sense of self and his poetry lacks interiority.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 220 He also highlights the fact that Alberti was a virtuoso versifier, able to counterfeit the manner of Gil Vicente or any other folk poet. Cernuda does not approve of the playfulness that Alberti shows in his first three collections. He does not believe that Alberti rises above the level of his models, such as Góngora and Guillén in ''Cal y canto'' - in other words he sees Alberti as a parodist rather than as an original poet.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 221 The reader gets the impression that he envies the fact that Alberti became so successful so rapidly, using him as an example of a poet who found his public immediately. These thoughts were written in his essay in ''Estudios sobre poesía espaňola contemporánea'' on Alberti and seem to derive from Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", because he goes on to draw a contrast between writers who are readily accepted by the public with writers who are more original, who modify the tradition with their own experiences of life and who have to wait for the public to accept them. Cernuda ends up by praising his poetic fluency and virtuosity while stating that he had nothing to say and that his work is basically deprived of passion and emotion. Cernuda even wonders whether Alberti's recognition of the social injustice of Spain was the inspiration for him to write political poetry because it is difficult to see any fundamental change in his ideas and feelings.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 223 The political poems are not very different from his previous phase and he remains just as committed to traditional poetic forms as ever. Cernuda closes his essay by noting that Alberti's commitment to Communism does not stop him from turning to apolitical subject-matter in which the reader can divine nostalgia for his former success. In an attempt to revive this, he churns out variations of his old themes.Altolaguirre and his family
That there was a close bond between Altolaguirre, his wife Concha Méndez, and Cernuda seems clear. Cernuda devoted separate chapters in both ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'' and ''Poesía y literatura'' to the poetry of Altolaguirre, consistently asserting that he was not a minor poet, despite the critical consensus to that effect. In ''Desolación de la Quimera'', he defends his dead friend from superficial, mistaken memories of "Manolito" the endearing man, held by people who have forgotten or never knew his rare gifts as a poet, in "Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario". It is like an echo of his fears for what will happen to his own reputation after death - will people remember him or turn to the legends promulgated by people like Salinas. When Altolaguirre and Concha married in June 1932, Cernuda was one of the witnesses at their wedding, along with Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Guillén.Altolaguirre intro to Las Islas invitadas p 14 When in March 1933 their first child died in childbirth, Cernuda dedicated a poem to him - "XIV" in ''Donde habite el olvido''.Altolaguirre intro to Las Islas invitadas p 15 They lived in the same building in Madrid from 1935 to 1936 and, in Mexico, he lived in Concha's house. At times, it seems that this was his real family. In ''Desolación de la Quimera'', there are two poems that suggest this. "Animula, vagula, blandula" is a tender poem about watching Altolaguirre's five-year-old grandson, whom he nicknamed Entelechy, playing in the garden and wondering how his fate will differ from his own. "Hablando a Manona" is like a nursery rhyme addressed to their granddaughter.Villena notes to Desolación de la quimera p 200Generation of 1898
Cernuda's best critical writing tends to be about writers who interested and inspired him. His writing about the Generation of 1898 is objective but nevertheless lacking in sympathy for the most part. For one thing, he seems to have found it difficult to forge personal relations with them. Regarding Juan Ramón Jiménez and Valle-Inclán, he recalled that they were so intent on their own speech that they neglected to listen to other people. And even in respect of Antonio Machado, so revered by for example Alberti,Alberti p 216 he recalled that he spoke little and listened to even less.Cernuda OCP vol 2 Juan Ramón Jiménez 1941 p 156 In contrast to most Spanish thinkers, he respectedthese poems are sudden glimpses of the world, bringing together the real and the suprasensible, with a rarely achieved identification.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea p 136He is also drawn to the commentaries of Abel Martín and the notes of Juan de Mairena which began to appear in 1925. In these, he finds the "sharpest commentary on the epoch".Cernuda OCP vol 1 Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea p 131 On the other hand, he is definitely not attracted by the nationalistic themes that appear in ''Campos de Castilla'', especially the poet's focus on Castile, which Cernuda sees as negating the essence of Machado's best poetry, which stems from his Andalusian nature. However, this is difficult to reconcile with a strand of Cernuda's own poetry, as exemplified by the first poem of the "Díptico español" from ''Desolación de la Quimera'', which is a tirade of invective against Spain that would not seem out of place in Machado. Indeed, one of Cernuda's major themes is the contrast between modern Spain after the Civil War and the glorious past, which is also an important current in Machado's poetry. One aspect of Machado that he focuses on is his use of language and how he fails when he tries to emulate the type of popular language described by German Romantics. He shows particular scorn for Machado's attempt to write a popular ballad, "La tierra de Alvargonzález". As Octavio Paz says:
"Jiménez and Antonio Machado always confused "popular language" with spoken language, and that is why they identify the latter with traditional song. Jiménez thought that "popular art" was simply the traditional imitation of aristocratic art; Machado believed that the true aristocracy resided in the people and that folklore was the most refined art.......Influenced by Jiménez, the poets of Cernuda's generation made of ballad and of song their favourite genre. Cernuda never succumbed to the affectation of the popular.....and tried to write as one speaks; or rather: he set himself as the raw material of poetic transmututation not the language of books but of conversationPaz: La palabra edificante trans Michael Schmidt in Gibbons:Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda p xxi-xxiiThe member of that generation who had most impact on him is Jiménez, although when he went to Britain one of the very few books that he took with him was Gerardo Diego's anthology ''Poesía española'' and he found solace for his nostalgia for Spain in reading the selection of poems by Unamuno and Machado contained within. It is also true that in his study of Unamuno, he makes a comment that seems to relate directly to his own practice as a writer, his preoccupation with creating and perpetuating himself in his poetry, transforming the circumstances of his life into myth:Derek Harris: Introduction to Poesía completa p 48
Alive and striving beyond what were only current circumstances, moments that pass and do not remain, Unamuno was hoping to create himself, or at least create his personal myth, and to be forever what was passing.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Miguel de Unamuno p 129He first met Jiménez in late September-early October 1925 in Seville. The meeting had been arranged by Pedro Salinas and he suggested to Cernuda that he should ask one of his friends, whose father was a warden of the Alcázar, for permission to visit the gardens, out of hours.Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL II Los Dos Juan Ramón Jiménez p 733 Cernuda's account is interesting. He was overawed by being in the presence of such an important figure. In addition, there was the presence of Jiménez's wife - Zenobia Camprubí - which also put him at a disadvantage, both because of his shyness and a lack of interest in women, although he had not yet realised why women did not interest him.Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL II Los Dos Juan Ramón Jiménez p 734 He placed himself in the role of a disciple, just listening to the Master. He records how gracious Jiménez was to him that evening and on subsequent meetings. At that time, he was something of a hero to Cernuda and he notes how much effort it cost him to free himself from Jiménez's type of egoistic, subjective poetry with no connection to the world and life, which was so influential in Spanish cultural circles at that time. In the essay in which he describes this meeting, "Los Dos Juan Ramón Jiménez", included in ''Poesía y literatura vol 2'', he analyses the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Jiménez. On the one hand he was a famous poet, worthy of admiration and respect. On the other hand, he was the man who launched abusive attacks on numerous literary figures. This latter side gradually became more and more dominant.Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL II Los Dos Juan Ramón Jiménez p 731 In particular he took against the poets of Cernuda's own generation, at first confining his attacks to verbal ones but then turning to print. He continued to print vilifications right to the end of his life, which had the effect of turning Cernuda's former admiration into indifference or even worse. Cernuda wrote many pieces about Jiménez, including a satirical poem included in ''Desolación de la Quimera''. The early influence was decisively rejected and his essays identify all the stylistic elements that he cast off, such as the impressionistic symbolism,Harris A Study of the Poetry p5 hermeticism,Cernuda OCP vol 1 Juan Ramón Jiménez p 149 the fragmentation of his poems,Cernuda OCP vol 1 Juan Ramón Jiménez p 147 his inability to sustain a thought, the lack of desire to go beyond the surface of things.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Juan Ramón Jiménez p 143 His final thoughts about Jiménez came in an essay titled "Jiménez y Yeats" dated 1962 and included in ''Poesía y literatura vol 2''. E.M. Wilson included a look at this in his survey of Cernuda's literary borrowings because it contains a translation of Yeats's poem "A Coat" and compares it to Jiménez's "Vino, primera, pura". Of the translation, Wilson writes
One can point out minor infidelities....but the translation has life of its own and fulfils its purpose in Cernuda's essay: a rod for the back of Juan Ramón Jiménez.Cernuda's Debts in Studies Presented to Helen Grant p 242Cernuda concludes that Jiménez is a more limited poet than Yeats because the latter put his poetry to one side in order to campaign for Irish Home Rule and to work as director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin whereas Jiménez's whole life was totally dedicated to poetry. He devoted himself to aesthetics and did not involve himself with ethical considerations at all.Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL II Jiménez y Yeats p 824-5
Gide, the dandy and homosexuality
His sexual awakening seems to have coincided with the birth of his desire to write poetry, around the age of 14, but it was many years later before he really came to terms with this side of himself. A very important influence on his emotional development were the writings of André Gide. In ''Historial de un libro'', Cernuda wrote that his introduction to the works of Gide was when Pedro Salinas gave him either ''Prétextes'' or ''Nouveaux Prétextes'' to read, followed by ''Morceaux Choisis'', which is a selection by Gide himself of passages from his works. These books opened the way for him to resolve or at least reconcile himself with "a vital, decisive problem within me".Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I Historial de un Libro p 628 These works deal openly with the topic of homosexuality amongst many other things.Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 94 For example, Gide included in the ''Morceaux Choisis'' the section of ''Les Caves du Vatican'' where Lafcadio Wluiki pushes Amédée Fleurissoire out of a moving train just from curiosity as to whether he can actually bring himself to do it - the original ''acte gratuit''. Cernuda comments,"I fell in love with his youth, his grace, his freedom, his audacity." This is redolent of the homoeroticism of a poem such as "Los marineros son las alas del amor" in ''Los placeres prohibidos.'' He went so far as to write a fan letter, perhaps even a love letter, to Lafcadio, which was printed in ''El Heraldo de Madrid'' in 1931. It includes these words: "the only real thing in the end is the free man, who does not feel part of anything, but lives wholly perfect and unique in the midst of nature, free from imposed and polluting customs."Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I Carta a Lafcadio Wluiki p 805 This is reiterated in his essay of 1946, where he writes: "the transcendent figure for Gide is not that of a man who by means of abstention and denial searches for the divine, but that of a man who seeks out the fullness of humanity by means of effort and individual exaltation."Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I André Gide p 549 In other words, he was affected by the idea of totalThere is profit in desires, and profit in the satisfaction of desires - for so they are increased. And indeed, Nathaniel, each one of my desires has enriched me more than the always deceitful possession of the object of my desire.Gide: Fruits of the Earth p 18So hedonism and the exaltation of desire are not enough in themselves; what matters is the dignity and integrity of the desire. That is what gives it virtue, not the object of the desire.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study of the Poetry p 48 As Cernuda expressed it, "what he holds in his arms is life itself, rather than a desired body."Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I André Gide p 554 In "Unos cuerpos son como flores", another poem from ''Los placeres prohibidos'', the transience of love is accepted as a perfectly normal phenomenon because it is the transcendent nature of that love that overrides everything.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study of the Poetry p 49 Following Gide's example, Cernuda becomes concerned with maintaining his personal integrity. Free from guilt, he will live true to his own values, which include rejection of conventional sexual mores and acceptance of his homosexuality.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study of the Poetry p 53 In "La palabra edificante", Octavio Paz wrote "Gide gave him the courage to give things their proper names; the second book of his surrealist period is called ''Los placeres prohibidos'' (Forbidden Pleasures). He does not call them, as one might have expected ''Los placeres pervertidos'' (Perverse Pleasures)".Paz: La palabra edificante trans Michael Schmidt in Gibbons:Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda p xxv Cernuda's reading of Gide was thorough. As well as the works mentioned above, his essay includes discussions of the "Journals", ''Les cahiers d'André Walter, Le Traité du Narcisse, Paludes, Le Prométhée Mal Enchaîné, Les Nourritures Terrestres, Amyntas, L'Immoraliste, La Porte Etroite, Le Retour de l'Enfant Prodigue, Corydon, Les Caves du Vatican, Les Faux Monnayeurs, Si le grain ne meurt,'' and ''Thésée.'' One of the most interesting passages concerns Gide's memoirs, ''Si le grain ne meurt.'' Many of the episodes recounted in this book had formed the basis for his previous works; however, this new account is not so much a repetition as a complement to the previous versions. The reader gets a broader vision of what was happening. Gide's works are clarified and are heightened when they can be interpreted in the light of the extra information in the memoirs.Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I André Gide p 548 It was clearly with a similar aim in mind that Cernuda set out writing ''Historial de un libro'', to recount "the story of the personal events that lie behind the verses of ''La realidad y el deseo.''" Narcissism is another trait that Gide and Cernuda shared: "After all, we cannot know anybody better than our self."Cernuda OCP vol 1 PyL I André Gide p 550 At times, it seems that the two writers share the same sensibility. For example, Gide had visited Seville in 1892, in company with his mother, and was struck by the gardens of the Alcázar. This made its way into ''Les nourritures terrestres'': "What of the Alcazar? Marvellous as a Persian garden! Now I come to speak of it, I believe I prefer it to all the others. When I read Hafiz, I think of it."Gide: Fruits of the Earth p 47 Cernuda describes a similar sense of transcendence in "Jardín antiguo" in ''Ocnos''. Gide was in Seville during ''Semana Santa'' and revelled in the sensuality of the celebrations. In his journals, he describes how there was a feeling of loosening the corsets and throwing off prudish morality, which is quite similar to the atmosphere of Cernuda's poem "Luna llena en Semana Santa" from ''Desolación de la Quimera.''Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 95-96 As seen in his accounts of his first meetings with Jiménez in 1925 and Lorca in 1927, he took a few years to come to terms fully with his sexuality. This only seems to happen once he finally left Seville in 1928, after his mother's death. However, during that period he seems to have cultivated his sense of difference by becoming a dandy. During his time at the University of Seville, Salinas had already noted his dapper appearance, commenting on his "well-cut suit, a perfectly-knotted tie".Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 12 This tendency seems to have intensified during his brief stay in Madrid before going to Toulouse, where he assumed the pose of a man who frequents bars, drinks cocktails, affects English shirts, discussed in an article by Villena (''La rebeldía del dandy en Luis Cernuda'').Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 16 Villena diagnoses it as the sign of a refined hermit trying to hide his hyper-sensitivity and repressed desire for love. In Toulouse, he wrote to a friend that he was starting to think that he was too well-dressed.Epistolario letter 140 to Higinio Capote November 1928 p 103 Two months later, he wrote to the same friend complaining that he had only managed to make female friends - the young men being too coarse for him - and boasting about some purchases: an American hat exactly like the one worn by Gilbert Roland in the film Camille, a wristwatch that cost 1000 francs and some other things "simply so that during these courses they might call me a snob and accuse me of being frivolous and lightweight." He also says that he sometimes wears his moustache in the manner of Don Alvarado or Nils Asther.Epistolario letter 150 to Higinio Capote January 1929 p 111 In his short story ''El indolente'' Cernuda reflects on dandyism:
a certain friend once claimed to convince the writer of this that he dressed and adorned himself not to attract but rather to rebuff people from his side. He had noticed, or thought he had noticed, that if an elegant women attracts, the elegant man repels. According to this theory, dandyism would be just one of the ways of aspiring to the ascetic solitude of the wasteland.Cernuda OCP vol 2 El indolente p 272In some way, however, the combination of his contact with the world, especially the atmosphere of Paris which he visited in the university vacations, the rebellious attitudes and thinking of the surrealists, the influence of Gide, and his pent-up fight against bourgeois tendencies coincided in the belated acceptance of his sexuality, as expressed finally in ''Un río, un amor''.Harris intro to Poesía completa p 53 His dandified style of dressing seems to have continued for the rest of his life. For example in 1950, he stayed overnight with Jorge Guillén and the latter wrote to Pedro Salinas,"What a blue robe with white spots...what a smell of perfume in the passageway on rising the following morning!"Epistolario note p 479
Critical reception and legacy
For a long time, the reactions of critics to Cernuda's poetry were based on a caricature of his personality - the shy, introverted but prickly person so quick to take offence. Concha de Albornoz, one of his closest friends, wrote of him "his is a climate that changes: now serene, now tormented. Sometimes I feel so close to him and at other times so distant ... His spirit is like a fly's eye: made of a thousand facets."Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 282 He found it difficult to make friends. Many of the people who knew him allude to his aloofness and this is a trait borne out by the critical comments he makes in his writings about his contemporaries, which are sometimes so harsh that it is hard to believe they were ever friends or colleagues. Cernuda was well aware that his reputation was of a complicated, tortured individual and this became a matter of concern for him in his later years. In the final poem in his final collection, "A sus paisanos", he criticises his countrymen for the way they have accepted this perception of him, without making any effort to see if it is justified. He makes it clear that this "legend" is a gross distortion of reality:It seems likely that the four "friends" were Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre and José Moreno Villa. Jiménez shows him as aloof and effete to the point of sickliness. Aleixandre emphasises Cernuda's solitariness and detachment from the world. Salinas shows him as dedicated, timid, solitary and fragile.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 10-12 Moreno Villa, in his autobiography, concentrates on the tortured side of his character and effeminacy: "He was then a fine and shy young man, very dapper and very sad. He suffered with material things and with human relationships. They say he cried in front of the windows of clothes's shops because he could not buy some silk shirts; but I, of course, have seen him almost in tears for not having friends or anyone to love him."Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 184 It is striking that all these accounts refer to the young man they knew in the 1920s and 1930s but Moreno Villas wrote his autobiography in 1944; Salinas wrote his description in 1945 and Aleixandre in 1955. The only contemporary account was Jiménez's from 1934. Cernuda's character seems to have left a lasting impression on them which they do not seem to have thought of revising. The fundamental problem is the unquestioning, if not naive, belief that the poetry is the man, that there is no distinction between them. They project the brittle, languid, effete personality of the man they knew onto his poetry even though it reveals a very partial, incomplete and misleading reading. It might apply to some of the earlier work but it bears no relation to the passion of the surrealist poems, or the later poems of reflection and self-examination, or the use of the ''Doppelgänger'' device.Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 12 Even as late as 1962, it was possible for a critic to write "he is so accustomed by now to live surrounded only by the creations of his own mind - who obey him always and are much more easily controlled than people - that real company bothers him."Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 13 The projection of these unbalanced ideas of the man onto the poetry - a man seeking to escape from the real world - was the dominant theme of Cernuda criticism, even among people who never met him. It was not until 1965 that a different viewpoint began to emerge. The key was the publication in that year of Octavio Paz's essay ''La palabra edificante'': "Cernuda's work is an exploration of himself...He said it himself:'I have only tried, like every man, to find my truth, my own, which will not be better or worse than that of others, only different.'...The work of Cernuda is a road toward our own selves. That is what gives it its moral value."Paz: La palabra edificante trans Michael Schmidt in Gibbons:Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda p xii Cernuda is a moralist, a seeker after truth rather than an effete man of glass. Of course, this is implied by the title he chose for his oeuvre, ''La realidad y el deseo''. His work is grounded in reality and he criticises poets, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, who try to escape from or ignore reality. In the words of Villena, "Cernuda defends liberty, anti-conventionalism, joy, faithfulness to your own destiny, the individual leading the way for other people, a blend of stoicism and epicureanism." He goes on to compare the satirical poems in Cernuda's final collection to those of¿Mi leyenda dije? Tristes cuentos Inventados de mí por cuatro amigos (¿Amigos?), que jamás quisisteis Ni ocasión buscasteis de ver si acomodaban A la persona misma así traspuesta. Mas vuestra mala fe los ha aceptado (Did I say my legend? Sad tales made up about me by four friends, (Friends?), that you never wanted nor sought any occasion to check to see whether they fitted that person thus superimposed. But your bad faith has accepted them)
Popular culture
* A sculptural monument to Cernuda stands in Sevilla, Spain. * Spanish painter Gregorio Prieto drew portraits of Luis Cernuda and Vicente Aleixandre. * The Spanish government has issued several postage stamps featuring portraits of Cernuda, including a stamp issued on the one hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth.Notes
Bibliography
* * * * * *(Library of Congress Catalog Card Number) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *J. A. Coleman, ''Other voices. A study of the late poetry of Luis Cernuda'' (North Carolina University Press, 1969) * Ph. Silver, ''Luis Cernuda: el poeta en su leyenda'' (Madrid, 1972) * D. Harris (ed.), ''Luis Cernuda'' (Madrid, 1977) * R. Martínez Nadal, ''Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda. El hombre y sus temas'' (Madrid, 1983) * M. Petrelli, "L'arte pura in tutte le lingue del mondo: Luis Cernuda" in " Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani", vol. 1, n. 2, 2009. * M. Ulacia, ''L. Cernuda: escritura, cuerpo y deseo'' (Barcelona, 1986).External links