Obras de vicente aleixandre biography y

Santiago Daydí-Tolson
University of Texas at San Antonio

Letters

Biographies

References

1977 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

Aleixandre: Banquet Speech

Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1977

Aleixandre: Nobel Lecture, 12 December 1977

This entry was expanded by Daydí-Tolson from his Aleixandre entry in DLB 108: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poets, First Series.

BOOKS: Ambito (Málaga: Literal, 1928);
Espadas como labios (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1932);
Pasión de la tierra (Mexico City: Fábula, 1935);

La destrucción o el amor (Madrid: Signo, 1935; revised, 1944); selections translated by Stephen Kessler as Destruction or Love (Santa Cruz, Cal.: Green Horse Three, 1976);

Sombra del paraíso (Madrid: Adán, 1944); translated by Hugh A. Harter as Shadow of Paradise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);

Vida del poeta: El amory la poesía (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1950);

Mundo a solas (Madrid: Clan, 1950); translated by Lewis Hyde and David Unger as World Alone (Great Barrington, Mass.: Penmaen Press, 1982);

Nacimiento último (Madrid: Ígravensula, 1953);

Historia del corazón (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1954);

Algunos caracteres de la nuevapoesía española (Madrid: Instituto de España/Góngora, 1955);

Mis poemas mejores (Madrid: Gredos, 1956; augmented, 1968);

Los encuentros (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1958);

Poesías completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960);

Poemas amorosos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1960; enlarged, 1970);

Picasso (Málaga: Guadalhorce, 1961);

En un vasto dominio (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962);

Presencias (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1965);

Retratos con nombre (Barcelona: Bardo, 1965);

Dos vidas (Málaga: Guadalhorce, 1967);

Poemas de la consumatión (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1968);

Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968; revised and enlarged, 2 volumes, 1978);

Antología del mar y la noche, edited by J

One of my favorite things to do when creating lesson plans and homework assignments is to find visuals that evoke the same themes or feelings as the literary text. When teaching poetry for example, I have found that images work to make the complexities and ambiguities of the text less intimidating and frustrating. Or they sometimes cause students to “see” something in the poem that they had missed  on their first read. These comparisons help my students arrive at analysis – HOW do the selection or order of words, the meter, or the use of devices like repetition or metaphor, create imagery or sensations that are similar to those conveyed by a visual? In the past when I taught film and theater set in post-war Spain (1940s-1950s), I had used surrealist paintings by Salvador Dalí, as well as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica – perhaps the most famous contemporary representation of the destruction and horrors of war – to introduce the magnitude of the war in its historical context. A few weeks ago I returned to Guernica to teach about the Spanish Civil War more generally in my literature class, and this time I paired it with with a 1937 poem by Vicente Aleixandre, “Oda a los niños de Madrid muertos por la metralla” (“Ode to the dead children of Madrid killed by shrapnel”). The analysis activity I used in my literature class worked well as a way of discussing literary and visual techniques, so I thought I would make a new “teaching” post to share this lesson.

In my previous post, “Painting the Spanish Civil War,” I wrote about the appearance of the Spanish Civil War and its effects in the artistic production of Salvador Dalí as a way of illustrating the extent to which the conflict impacted the country’s artists and intellectuals, especially those of the “Generation of 1927”. Born in 1898, Vicente Aleixa

Spanish poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. Vicente Aleixandre has been called an existentialist, a mystic pantheist, and a neoromantic. Although Aleixandre did not consider himself an orthodox surrealist, his poems contained surrealistic images and Freudian subconscious associations. Central motifs are erotic love, solitude, time, and death. From his mid-20s, Alexaindre suffered from kidney tuberculosis.

When did I begin to write? This question, invariably the first, is easily answered. I'm a rather late poet, if we call someone late who wasn't introduced to poetry until he was eighteen years old. Life went along until one summer, in a town in the Sierra de Avila where by chance we'd met and made friends, D�maso Alonso, a boy like myself, handed me my first book of poems. How pleased I am to to tell everybody now! The poet D�maso gave me was Rub�n Dario, and that truly maiden reading was a revolution to my soul. I discovered poetry: it stood revealed, and the one great passion of my life took hold in me, and never let go. (A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, edited by Lewis Hyde, Copper Canyon Press, 2007, p. 133)

Vicente Aleixandre was born in Seville into a well-to-do family. He was the only son of Cirilo Aleixander Ballester, a civil engineer, and Elvira Merlo Garcia de Pruneda, the daughter of the district military superintendent; she died in 1934. Aleixandre grew up in M�laga, and later depicted its sunny landscape in his poems. After moving in 1909 with his parents and sister to Madrid, Aleixandre attended the Colegio Teresiano, from which he received his high school diploma in 1913. The following year he entered the University of Madrid, where he studied law.

Upon graduation in 1920,  Aleixandrebecame an assistant professor at the School of Mercantile Management in Madrid. He then worked for the Andalusian Railways, and wrote poetry for his own pleasure; afraid of criticism, he neve

Born in Sevile in 1898, Vicente Aleixandre spent his early summers in Málaga, the place that spawned many of his later poems. In the early 1920s he moved to Madrid, participating in the discussions at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where many poets of his generation, including Federico García Lorca and Jorge Guillén, met and talked on a regular basis. But it was the poetry of Rubén Darío that most influenced his early work, and stirred him to begin writing poetry as well.

His first poetry appeared in Ambito (Ambit) in 1928, after his friends had sent some of the works to José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente. Despite the obvious influences of other poets in these early poems, the work revealed many of the characteristics of Aleixandre's later writing.

Beginning in 1925, Aleixandre, having contracted tubercular nephritis, was secluded and had to curtail his activities. His second book, Pasión de la tierra (1935) (Earth Passion), is more clearly a result of his illness. Having recently read the works of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, Aleixandre used various metaphors and similes through this work to present a sort of dialogue between eros and thanatos. Because of the Spanish Civil War, this important work, originally published in Mexico City, was virtually unknown in Spain until the mid-1940s.

In 1932 Aleixandre published Espadas como labios, written after Pasión de la tierra, but published previous to it. The book marked a return to versification and to a greater control of images. La destrucción o el armor (Destruction of Love), also published in 1935, further explored erotic love against a background of a natural world which is in complete flux, alternating between destruction and transfiguration.

Written in 1934, Mundo a solas (World Alone) was published in 1950. This is a much darker and pessimistic book in its presentation of mankind's loss of primeval i