Partner
Carlos Bousoño
Queer Places:
Cementerio de la Almudena
Madrid, Provincia de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Vicente
Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo (26 April 1898 – 14 December 1984) was
a Spanish poet who was born in Seville.[1]
Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative
poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in
present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the
traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars".[2]
He was part of the Generation of '27. Aleixandre's bisexuality was well known
to his circle of friends, but he never admitted it publicly. He had a
long-term love relationship with the poet
Carlos Bousoño.[5]
Román Gubern writes about the gay group which surrounded Salvador Dalí and
Federico García
Lorca (among them,
Luis Cernuda, Benjamín Palencia,
Juan Gil-Albert,
Vicente
Aleixandre, Gustavo Durán and
Eduardo Blanco Amor) men who were “compañeros
de [la] constelación cultural de García Lorca”.
Aleixandre's early poetry, which he wrote mostly in free verse, is highly
surrealistic. It also praises the beauty of nature by using symbols that
represent the earth and the sea. Many of Aleixandre's early poems are filled
with sadness. They reflect his feeling that people have lost the passion and
free spirit that he saw in nature. He was one of the greatest poets of Spanish
literature alongside Cernuda and Lorca.[3]
The melancholia of his poetry was also the melancholy of failed or ephemeral
love affairs.[4]
His first book, Ámbito, written between 1924 and 1927 and published
in Málaga in 1928, is the work of an incipient poet who has not yet found his
own voice. The assonated short verse and art for art's sake aesthetics of Juan
Ramón Jiménez and Jorge Guillén prevail, in addition to the ultraistic echoes
of classical Spanish poetry from the Golden Age, especially Fray Luis de León
and Góngora.
In the following years, between 1928 and 1932, there is a radical change in
Aleixandre's poetic conception. Inspired by the predecessors of surrealism
(especially
Arthur Rimbaud and Lautréamont) and by Freud, he adopts prose poetry (Passion
of the Earth, 1935), free verse, and plainly
surreal methods such as free verse and the visionary image (Swords like
Lips, 1932; Destruction or Love, 1935; Shadow of Paradise,
1944) as his form of expression. The aesthetics of these poems are irrational,
and the expression comes close to "flow", even without accepting it as a dogma
of faith. Along with surrealism, the poet does not take on any tradition, not
even the metric, and frees himself.
Luis Cernuda
could say: "Your verse is like nothing else." And in effect his style brings
unpublished stylistic novelties such as the inverted simile (Swords like
Lips) or the equivalent disjunctive nexus (Destruction or Love),
the hyperbole adds, the uncoded dream symbol, enriching without question the
stylistic possibilities of the Spanish poetic language, just as Garcilaso,
Góngora and Rubén Darío, each one a great renovator of lyric language, did in
the past. The poet celebrates love as a natural, ungovernable force that
breaks down all human limitations and criticizes the conventionalism with
which society attempts to conquer it.
His early collections of poetry include Passion of the Earth (1935)
and Destruction or Love (1933). In 1944, he wrote Shadow of Paradise,
the poetry where he first began to concentrate on themes such as fellowship,
friendliness, and spiritual unity. His later books of poetry include
History of the Heart (1954) and In a Vast Dominion (1962).
AAleixandre studied law at the University of Madrid. Selections of his work
were translated into English in Twenty Poems of Vicente Aleixandre (1977) and A Longing for the
Light: Selected Poems of Vincent Aleixandre (1979; Copper Canyon Press,
2007) translated by Lewis Hyde.
He died on 14 December 1984 in Madrid, aged 86.
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Aleixandre