Luis Cernuda and the Modern English Poets: A Study of the Influence of Browning, Yeats, and Eliot on His Poetry 9788497176170, 9788460051480, 846005148X, 8497176170

Table of contents :
Introduction......Page 5
Chapter 1 Las nubes: A transitional volume......Page 8
Chapter 2 Cernuda and Browning......Page 35
Chapter 3 Cernuda and Yeats......Page 60
Chapter 4 Cernuda and Eliot......Page 94
Conclusions......Page 120
Select Bibliography......Page 121

Citation preview

Luis Cernuda and the modern english poets Though several generations of critics have reported finding English influences in the poetry of Luis Cernuda, no detailed or systematic study of the question has yet been undertaken. This book tackles the issue, concentrating on the traces in Cernuda’s work of three major English language poets: Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Hughes takes us through a wide selection of the poetry Cernuda wrote in exile –which he holds to be the best and most significant work– in support of his argument that Cernuda’s conception of poetry underwent a radical reorganisation as a result of his absorption of certain of the techniques of his models. Browning’s influence, it is argued, is noticeable chiefly in prosodic features and in the use of the persona, Yeats’s is principally thematic, and Eliot’s is in some ways the most pervasive, since it affects Cernuda’s style and phrasing.

Edita: Secretariado de Publicaciones. Universidad de Alicante Diseño de portada: Enrique. Gabinete de Diseño. Universidad de Alicante Fotocomposición: COMPOBELL, S.A. Murcia Impresión: Hijos de E. MINUESA, S. L. ISBN (Edición digital): 978-84-9717-617-0 ISBN (Edición impresa): 978-84-600-5148-0 Depósito Legal: M. 13.415-1988 Estos créditos pertenecen a la edición impresa de la obra.

Introduction «No me queréis, lo sé, y que os molesta Cuanto escribo. ¿Os molesta? Os ofende. ¿Culpa mía tal vez o es de vosotros? Porque no es la persona y su leyenda Lo que ahí, allegados a mí, atrás os vuelve. ........................................................................................................... Contra vosotros y esa vuestra ignorancia voluntaria, Vivo aún, sé y puedo, si así quiero, defenderme. Pero aguardáis al día cuando ya no me encuentre Aquí. Y entonces la ignorancia, La indiferencia y el olvido, vuestras armas De siempre, sobre mí caerán, como la piedra, Cubriéndome por fin, lo mismo que cubristeis A otros que, superiores a mí, esa ignorancia vuestra Precipitó en la nada, como al gran Aldana.» («A sus paisanos»)

These lines, though not perhaps among his best, were written just over a year and a half before Cernuda died. The despondency brought on by age, exile and loneliness combines with the habitual acrimony and acerbity of his temperament to distort his view of his own public image; for, if his reputation was probably never as black as he persisted in painting it, it is now assured beyond question. Cernuda is generally held in discerning circles to be a great -perhaps the greatest- modern Spanish poet, an influence on, and, as Gil de Biedma puts it, an example to later generations. From Cernuda's poetry stems that of Valente, Gil de Biedma and Brines, and Ricardo Molina, Claudio Rodríguez and Luis Antonio de Villena would not have written as they do (or did) without his guidance, however unacknowledged. His line is, therefore, more influential than that of any of his contemporaríes, and when one considers that, among these contemporaries, Lorca, Aleixandre, Guillén and Alberti figured prominently, the achievement is indeed remarkable. The reasons why Cernuda's poetry should command such high and such universal respect are -some of them- evident almost at first reading: the smoothness of line, the vibrant intimacy of tone, the delicacy and deliberateness of diction, and the fundamental honesty of thought (what he thought of as “insobornabilidad”); all are characteristic of Cernuda from the earliest poetry. But there is more. Cernuda strikes the reader as a poet restlessly intrigued by his experience, and also marvellously in control of it. Wanting the effervescence and brilliance of Lorca or Alberti, temperamentally unfitted for the serenity of Guillén or the joviality of Salinas, he made a virtue of necessity: En ciertos poemas míos el verso queda como ensordecido bajo el dominio del ritmo de la frase. Desde temprano me agradó poco el verso de ritmo demasiado acusado, con su monotonía inevitable ( ... ) Si en el verso hay música, mi preferencia se orientó hacia la música callada del mismo ( ... ) Igual antipatía tuve siempre al lenguaje suculento e inusitado, tratando siempre de usar, a mi intención y propósito, es decir, con oportunidad y precisión, los vocablos de empleo diario: el lenguaje hablado y el tono coloquial hacia los cuales creo que tendí siempre.

Of all his qualities, it is perhaps this last that most attracts the newcomer to his poetry. But this restraint was never softness: his growing mastery of his art conceals enormous subtlety,

and there is perhaps more range in his mature poetry than in that of any other Spanish poet this century. There is a great deal of truth in his conviction that he had no need to learn modulation from the English poets: he was ready for the experience, predestined or “predisposed”, as he puts it. For the present writer, as for Cernuda himself, this contact with English poetry was decisive: Si no hubiese regresado, aprendiendo la lengua inglesa y, en lo posible, a conocer el país, me faltaría la experiencia más considerable de mis años maduros. Aprendí mucho de la poesía inglesa, sin cuya lectura y estudio mis versos serían hoy otra cosa, no sé si mejor o peor, pero sin duda otra cosa.

Cernuda rightly insists, on more than one occasion, that his own experience and his own tastes left him open to English influences, for he praises English poetry for the very qualities we have said he himself possessed: Pronto hallé en los poetas ingleses algunas características que me sedujeron: el efecto poético me pareció mucho más hondo si la voz no gritaba ni declamaba, ni se extendía reiterándose, si era menos gruesa y ampulosa.

It is true, as the popular phrase has it, that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and it is true generally -though, as we shall be trying to show, not in every case, and not precisely in the terms stated- that “ese efecto de la lectura de los poetas ingleses acaso fuera más bien uno cumulativo o de conjunto que el aislado o particular de tal poeta determinado”. But one of the reasons why the reading and study of Cernuda's poetry is so pleasurable and rewarding to the English speaker is precisely the felt presence of English poets behind Cernuda's verses. My own particular interest in his poetry, apart from the obvious pleasure of reading him, arises from an accumulated awareness of these echoes, which fírst pleased me, then intrigued me, and finally drove me to more precise enquiry. Having found confirmation, I sought a more exhaustive treatment of the issue, and hence the following essay. For, though all the critics of the last fifteen years or so -and some much earlier- have detected or reported English influences in Cernuda's poetry, there is as yet, as far as I know, no full-length study of the subject. The present essay is, therefore, an attempt, in the first place, to supply that; and it seems fitting that an English speaker should, as it were, return the compliment by taking an interest in Cernuda's interest in our poetry. Besides, it may be thought that the task is less laborious for an English speaker, who has the advantage of starting approximately from where Cernuda started. I have stressed Cernuda's modernity, and it is for this reason that this study concentrates on only three modern English poets: Browning, Yeats and Eliot. The importance of their work for Cernuda has been acknowledged by his major critics -Paz, Harris, Gil de Biedma, Valente, Silver, Otero, Goytisolo, etc- but, though we shall be investigating their connection with Cernuda's poetry in depth, the reader should not take away the impression that these were the only important figures. They were not: but this essay sets out to show that they were the key poets in the osmotic process which effected the change in Cernuda from a postRomantic of the Becquerian school into a consciously Modernist (not “modernista”) poet. I have, therefore, had to forgo, though with great reluctance, investigation of the importance of Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets), the Metaphysicals (Donne and Marvell in particular,

though some reference to them is made), Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson, all of whom, and others, it seems to me, played their part in shaping Cernuda's mature poetry. It is to he hoped that some day, someo ne will repair these weighty, but unavoidable, omissions. The aim of this study, then, is to examine the influence of Browning, Yeats and Eliot on Cernuda's poetry after his exile in Britain, i.e. from 1938, when he fled from the almost defeated Republic to London, and then during his stay in Britain and the U.S.A., until his death in Mexico, in 1963. In each case, we shall endeavour to gauge the nature, extent and effect of this influence, and to determine with reference to his earlier or later poetry, whether the influence was beneficial, and whether it was lasting. As Cernuda was a prolific critic and writer on poetry, we are in the fortunate position of having a reliable guide to his opinions of the method, style, diction and standing of each of the three poets. This material is used at the start of each chapter, in order to facilitate understanding of what Cernuda was attempting, and to act as a check on whether he successfully adapted his models to his own purposes, or to determine, if he departed from them, in what way he departed. As very little sense could be made of any such findings without a specific view of Cernuda's poetry before exile, an introductory chapter attempts a synthesis of his work before 1937, and in particular of the poems of Las nubes, the crucial transitional volume on which he was working during the Civil War, and which he completed in Glasgow. It is hoped that, in this way, the reader's task will be lightened, and the changes of direction in the forties and after will stand out more clearly for what they are: the effect of his reading of the English poets. Lastly, to forestall misunderstanding, we are not setting out to prove that Cernuda turned into a major Spanish poet as a result of beneficial English influences. He was already a major poet, and some -among them a critic as eminent as Ricardo Gullón- believe that the best of his poetry was written in Spain. My own personal view is that Las nubes and the three collections following it contain his best as well as his most mature poetry. But a poet does not choose his tradition, except indirectly; for Cernuda, that tradition first became apparent to him in the English-speaking countries. Besides, it is worth remarking that, if we except Browning, these English influences are not «English» at all, at least not in the narrow, parochial sense, but European, and originally French. It is, likewise, instructive to remember that Yeats was Irish and Eliot American (like Pound, who is something of a figure in the carpet in this essay). The word «English» is therefore to be understood throughout the book, unless otherwise stated, as a linguistic, rather than a geographical, description. When Cernuda undertook his almost systematic study of the English poets, he already had a shrewd idea of what he was looking for; and when he found it he took it, boldly and without apology. As he says: Así fue el norte completando en mí, meridional, la gama de emociones sensoriales.

Chapter 1 Las nubes: A transitional volume By the time he began work on Las nubes (1937-40), Cernuda had passed through the successive stages of artistic self-consciousness (Perfil del aire, Egloga, Elegía, Oda), surrealism [1] (Un río, un amor, Los placeres prohibidos) and incipient neo-Romanticism (Donde habite el olvido, Invocaciones). He was now to come to terms with the facts of exile: the abrupt transition from the comfort of Spain, where his reputation was virtually assured, to the very different life-style of an assistant teacher in a Surrey school and later at Glasgow University[2]. In Historial de un Libro[3], Cernuda has recorded his reactions to his new life: on the one hand, admiration for the settled habit of civilisation he recognised in British manners, but on the other hand discomfort, distaste and, finally, disaffection, evident in the valedictory poem La partida from the later Vivir sin estar viviendo: “(Adiós al fin, tierra como tu gente fría, Donde un error me trajo y otro error me lleva. Gracias por todo y nada. No volveré a pisarte .)” [4]

This was also the period in which Cernuda began his studies in English Literature, which were henceforth to play a constant and decisive role in his practice as a poet. But before we begin to consider the development of his style in relation to his reading of the English poets, it would be helpful, to look briefly at the direction in which his poetry was moving in the poems from Las nubes written before he arrived in Britain, and before he acquired a sufficient mastery of our language to have been influenced other than accidentally by any English language poet. From this point of view, the most striking novelties are the objectivity of the compositions and their abundant use of discursive, as opposed to metaphor-based techniques, features which had already made their appearance in the later poems of Invocaciones, and which contrast quite dramatically with what had preceded them. Thus, in the Baudelairean La gloria del poeta, which opens “Demonio, hermano mío, mi semejante”, we read: “Es hora ya, es más que tiempo De que tus manos cedan a mi vida El amargo puñal codiciado del poeta; De que lo hundas, con sólo un golpe limpio, En este pecho sonoro y vibrante, idéntico a un laúd, Donde la muerte únicamente, La muerte únicamente, Puede hacer resonar la melodía prometida.” [5]

Here, together with a cluster of Romantic cornmonplaces (brotherhood in Satan, poetic deathwish, identity of poetic impulse and musical instrument, death as a liberation of the spirit) one notes the persistence of surrealist techniques, such as the logical presentation of irrational responses, or the extension by mere association of the line “En este pecho sonoro y

vibrante, idéntico a un laúd”, in which the word “idéntico”, by overstating the case, draws attention to itself, forcing us to consider the image qua image. This method of composition, still used in, e.g., “Dans ma péniche”, is in contrast with that used in the last poems of Invocaciones, and in Las nubes. In these later poems, the logic of syntax largely replaces that of metaphor, and the poems come to depend for their effect on subtIeties of sound and cadence, and on the quality of the thought itself, e.g.: “Hermosas y vencidas soñáis, Vueltos los ciegos ojos hacia el cielo, Marcando las remotas edades De titánicos hombres, Cuyo amor os daba ligeras guirnaldas Y la olorosa llama se alzaba Hacia la luz divina, su hermana celeste.” [6]

Now the freely-associating, free-ranging imagination has almost entirely disappeared, and the lines possess the discipline and the measured dignity of Cernuda's reflective poetry, though there is a characteristic sumptuousness of sound. One hears, too, how the liquids and sibilants are used to convey the quiet of thought. In general Cernuda's poetry will tend henceforth towards the suppression of emphatic surface effects, and will subject exuberances of style to necessities of expression. Not that his poetry was ever much marked by excess; rather he now makes a virtue of continence, and a remark made many years later, in 1954, suggests what it was that he was trying to avoid. He writes: los poetas de la generación de 1925, aún distando de creer que la poesía sólo existe en metáforas, introducían en sus versos demasiadas metáforas voluntarias y efectistas [7].

One naturally wonders what brought about this change in perspective, and, though speculation is always risky, we can at least try to make sense of the evidence available concerning Cernuda's life at this time and the way his mind was working. In the first place, there is the question of age: he was now past the first climacteric of thirty, and approaching full maturity. This, in combination with the natural gravity of his character and his utter dedication to his art, might he1p to account for the increasing seriousness, even sombreness, of his poetry, and his growing distaste for the productions of the vanguard. Secondly, there is the question of his homosexuality. Without wishing to dwell on a matter indifferent in itself as far as literary criticism is concerned[8], there can be little doubt that this circumstance, especially in the morally staid Spain of the period, drove a wedge between Cernuda and many of his old friends and acquaintances. His repeated attacks in later life on Guillén, Salinas and Dámaso Alonso were directed at what, to Cernuda, was their hidebound conventionalism, but some part, at least, of his truculence is explainable as vexation against what he considered to be their flaunting of bourgeois morality, specifically sexual morality. Certainly, something of the air of the respectable paterfamilias living in contented domesticity is discernible in the writings, even in the poetry, of Guillén and Salinas, and in Dámaso Alonso's vast personality a certain smugness is occasionally apparent[9]. Whatever the merits of Cernuda's position, these considerations are likely to have increased his feeling

of isolation, his sense of the hostility of the world at large. Luis Antonio de Villena has seen in Cernuda's dandified airs a defence against such hostility [10] and we have Juan Gil-Albert's evidence that Cernuda, in his conversation, consistently affected indifference to intellectual topics, showing a marked preference for social chit-chat on contemporary ephemera[11]. From evidence of this kind, some critics (notably Harris, Coleman and Delgado)[12] have deduced that Cernuda was prone to evasiveness, in his private life as in his poetry, but a milder term such as “timidity” or “restraint” is equally applicable and assumes far less. He himself has referred to his social awkwardness as una incapacidad típica mía, la de serme difícil, en el trato con los demás, exteriorizar lo que llevo dentro, es decir entrar en comunicación con los otros, aunque algunas veces lo desee.[13]

The fact that he has spoken out on the subject surely argues against the evasion theory. What is undeniable is that when he felt sure of his ground, any vestige of hesitance left him and common prudence could barely restrain him. The astonishing venom of his retorts to Salinas' reference to him as the “licenciado Vidriera”[14] and to Dámaso Alonso's apparently inoffensive comments about his age and provenance, is clearly the reaction of a man who feels wounded in his sensibility no less than in his dignity or his vanity. Moreover, if one suspects the existence of a less naive Cernuda, one might ponder the fact that the bitterest attacks were reserved for these three, who were not only the doyens of the group, but also the non-Andalousians. Lastly, there is the obvious fact that Cernuda's political sympathies during the thirties and the Civil War were decidedly Republican and anti-establishment, and they remained so even after his disillusionment with official politics had caused him to withdraw his initial support for the specifically Communist cause[15]. His bewilderment at the atrocious spectacle of the war, his grief over the death of Lorca, and the bitterness of defeat, exile and separation from home and friends complete the increasingly sombre picture. These events left a permanent mark on him, as on so many of his contemporaries, and his melancholy now deepens to an outlook close to despair. Hope and consolation are to reappear only intermittently from this time on. From the strict1y literary point of view, it is known[16] that Cernuda read both Hölderlin and Leopardi about this time (1936-37), even translating some of the former's work with the assistance of a German poet named Hans Gebser[17]. The influence of these poets on Cernuda's work is not in dispute, and it is not strictly part of our present concern to enter into the question of the extent of the hold of the one and the other over the Spanish poet. It may help, though, to notice that whereas a number of Hölderlin's favourite themes -a yearning for the gods of antiquity, admiration for the Hellenic civilisation viewed as a lost Golden Age, the sacred function of the poet- become important points of reference in Cernuda's own poetry, Leopardi seems to have left his mark more in point of manner than in point of subject. The tone of quiet despair, the meditative style, the classical restraint and equilibrium of line, and the use of natural scenery, broadly painted, to suggest both the beauty of the cosmos and the tragic isolation and transitoriness of man -both the actual and the symbolic- are all

characteristic of Leopardi's poetry, and become characteristic of Cernuda's from Las nubes onwards. The opening poem, “Noche de luna”, a long ode on the futility of human endeavour, recalls Leopardi's fondness for moonlit landscapes and philosophic musings (“Il Tramonto della Luna”, “Ultimo Canto di Safo”, “Canto Notturno”, etc.) and is even, on occasion, close to the Italian poet in phrasing, e.g.: “Intatta luna, tale E lo statto mortale.” (“Canto Notturno”) and “Cuánta sangre ha corrido Ante el destino intacto de la diosa.” (“Noche de luna”)

Possibly as a result of his reading of Leopardi, the early poems of Las nubes exhibit a greater assurance in the handling of rhythm, the basic forms used, as Cernuda himself pointed out, being the endecasyllable and the heptasyllable, but with a considerable amount of variation within this basic pattern. The effect is one of easy control, which marks a considerable development from the diffuse and somewhat wordy diction of a number of the poems in Invocaciones. One might contrast the lengthy “El joven marino”[18], for example, with this: Cuántas claras ruinas Con jaramago apenas adornadas Como fuertes castillos un día las has visto; Piedras más elocuentes que los siglos, Antes holladas por el paso leve De esbeltas cazadoras, un neblí sobre el puño, Oblicua la mirada soñolienta Entre un aburrimiento y un amor clandestino[19].

In contrast with the lingering and somewhat repetitive descriptions of the earlier poem, this stanza effortlessly sketches in the most striking features of the scene while retaining our interest in the point at issue: the passing of time, the destruction of beauty. The last three lines hold our attention not only by the sudden shift of perspective, but by the dramatic attitude of the huntresses, and by the suggestion of individual enterprise and intrigue in this generally doomed landscape. The second, fourth, fifth and seventh lines quoted unobtrusively keep the basic endecasyllabic rhythm, whilst the variation in the remaining lines (which is not, of course, free verse: the first line is heptasyllabic, and the third, sixth and eighth forin double heptasyllables united by the sense period) prevents monotony, thus ensuring an overall effect of naturalness and discipline combined. Another of the new features of Las nubes, again a question of style, concerns the increasing control Cernuda exercised over the development of his theme. He himself has commented valuably on his method of composition; and it is significant that this fresh interest in craftsmanship should have immediately preceded his discovery of the English language poets, particularly Browning, Yeats and Eliot. It was his classroom experience which alerted him to the possible value of the new method:

por otra parte, el trabajo de las clases me hizo comprender como necesario que mis explicaciones llevaran a los estudiantes a ver por sí mismos aquello de que yo iba a hablarles; que mi tarea consistía en encaminarles y situarles ante la realidad de una obra literaria española. De ahí sólo había un paso a comprender que también el trabajo poético creador exigía algo equivalente, no tratando de dar sólo al lector el efecto de mi experiencia, sino conduciéndole por el mismo camino que yo había recorrido, por los mismos estados que había experimentado y, al fin, dejarle solo frente al resultado[20].

We shall shortly be examining some of the ways in which the work of these poets affected Cernuda's own, but for the moment we may notice how the themes of the poems of Las nubes are thoroughly dealt with in a series of stages that go from the particular to the general, the gravity of tone and impartiality of observation contributing towards what is often an essentially dramatic structure. This occurs notably in “Noche de luna”, “A un poeta muerto” (the elegy on Lorca, completely rewritten and immeasurably improved in this respect)[21], “Scherzo para un elfo”, “Lamento y esperanza”, “Elegía española II”, and “La visita de dios”. In all of these poems, the, thoroughness of the development lends added resonance to the final lines, which, though generally abstract, do not have the disorienting effect that abstraction often has in poetry (and Cernuda's early poetry occasionally suffers from this blemish). These final lines have the force of a vision, a revelation or, in Joyce's sense, an epiphany, that is peculiarly satisfying. Here are a few samples: “Definitivamente frente a frente El silencio de un mundo que ha sido Y la pura belleza tranquila de la nada.” [22] “Sólo en ti creo entonces, vasta sombra, Tras los sombríos mirtos de tu pórtico Unica realidad clara del mundo.” [23] “Y subir, ángel vigía que atestigua del hombre, Allá hasta la región celeste e impasible.” [24] “la muerte, Unica gloria cierta que aún deseo.” [25]

A further development at this period is the altered perspective in which the figure of the poet is presented. Whereas in the earlier poetry the function of the poet, or the artist in general, was held to be self-justifying, reality uninformed by aesthetic effort being dismissed as unsubstantial, the view which now emerges is radically different, partly, as we have said, as a result of Cernuda's reading of Hölderlin. Without wishing to raise here the question of the dehumanisation of art in the earlier productions of the Generation of 1927, I would suggest that, at least in the cases of Cernuda, Alberti, Prados and Guillén (and later, possibly Lorca and Salinas) their attitude to their art altered after, and probably as a result of, their experience in the thirties. But, although in all cases this alteration has a social dimension, we must be careful not to oversimplify. Whereas Alberti began to write political poetry –that is, poetry subjected to the needs and discipline of a particular political creed– it would be absurd to view Cernuda or Prados henceforth as humanist poets –i.e., writing poetry subjected to the needs and discipline of humanism. Whether Cernuda was right or not to rebuke León Felipe for urging poets to become prophets, he was certainly justified in insisting upon the poet's right to independence. A poet's sufferings, he tells us,

en cuanto tal dolor o angustia individual del poeta, no valen más ni menos que el dolor y la angustia de otro hombre cualquiera; cuando pueden cobrar algún valor singular es cuando quedan transformados en poesía, que es cuando desaparecen como tal dolor o angustia personal del poeta[26].

What we find, in fact, in Cernuda's poetry –and sometimes in his prose, though this is not always as consistent as one would like– is a series of statements on the corrective spiritual function of the poet. There is, therefore, a volte-face apparent in his attitude towards the function of poetry, since earlier poems had tended to deny substance to non-poetic reality. Mallarmé, whose theories on poetry had stood Cernuda in good stead [27], is, appropriately, the poet who offers the encouragement he needs for a continuation and development of his aim. More and more Cernuda, like his predecessor, will strive to “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.”

Though this aim becomes especially clear in later volumes, a very complete statement of it occurs in “A un poeta muerto”, with this bitter acknowledgement: “Leve es la parte de la vida Que como dioses rescatan los poetas. El odio y la destrucción perduran siempre Sordamente en la entraña Toda hiel sempiterna del español terrible Que acecha lo cimero con su piedra en la mano.” [28]

The poet, he goes on to record, “llumina las palabras opacas Por el oculto fuego originario” [29]

words that recall Heraclitus, though, according to his own account[30], he first read the preSocratic philosophers long afterwards, at Mount Holyoke[31]. Be that as it may, Cernuda's view is now closer to the Romantic than to the Parnassian or Symbolist traditions. The poet's mission is semi-divine, but distinct from the divine; he brings clarity into the universe, and, by informing matter, makes it meaningful. The impulse to inform “opaque” words (i.e., words that are dense and formless, like matter) into poetic “illumination” (possibly after Rimbaud) comes not from the poet himself, but “De alguna mente creadora inmensa Que concibe al poeta cual lengua de su gloria Y luego le consuela a través de la muerte.” [32]

This speculative side of Cernuda's work is not, of course, new. It continues and develops the metaphysical strain apparent from the first books[33] and implicit in the overall title of the complete works, La realidad y el deseo. Moreover, it is not restricted lo the “philosophic treatment” of ontological themes, or to his continuing interest in the creative process itself: we find him constantly engaged upon an enquiry into the origins, significance and effects of love[34]. On occasions such as “A un poeta muerto”, the importance of the experience of love is stressed by dwelling on its opposite: “Pero antes no sabías La realidad más honda de este mundo: El odio, el triste odio de los hombres ... “[35]

This idea is then contrasted, in the dramatic manner noted above, with the moving last stanza, which begins: “Halle tu gran afán enajenado El puro amor de un dios adolescente Entre el verdor de las rosas eternas ... “[36]

so that, by the end a complete statement has been made about the power of love, which is identified with the forces that drive the poet. However, there also enters into the poem an idea that has hovered in the background of Invocaciones, and which is to become what we might call an intermittent obsession: “Para el poeta la muerte es la victoria, Un viento demoníaco le impulsa por la vida Y ( ... ) una fuerza ciega Sin comprensión de amor Transforma por un crimen A ti, cantor, en héroe... “[37]

This side of Cernuda, let us say at once, is not without its admirers, or even adherents, and Villena, in a long and pugnacious essay[38], seizes upon these lines to illustrate his thesis that Cernuda was of the devil's party and “creía en la muerte, by which he means that the poet “sólo cumple su plenitud, sólo reconstruye el viejo jardín para siempre perdido en algo que esté más allá de la vida: La muerte, o una forma del arte, la música, por ejemplo”. This may well be, and Villena finds Baudelaire and Byron (the Byron, of course, of Childe Harold and Lara) ready to hand. But Satanism and the cult of death had become commonplaces even in the time of Byron, and were pretty well standard equipment in that of Baude¡aire, which virtually robs them of any effectiveness -to shock? to dismay? to “épater le bourgeois”?- in the thirties of our own century, let alone today. But they cannot merely be dismissed as rhetoric or, worse, posturing. For such ideas are not simply childish and outmoded: they are stereotyped, and, therefore, will tend to wrest the reader's attention away from what is pertinent into a wholly inappropriate area of thought that is vaguely disquíeting and ultimately insubstantial. Of the six lines quoted, the last four are appropriate and necessary in the dramatic structure of the poem, but if, of the other two, the first seems merely in dubious taste, the second is surely the greater blemish, as it is not only a rehashing of a somewhat adolescent idea, but seriously damages the structure of the poem in its adventitious officiousness. For, even if we take “demoníaco” in its widest, or Greek, sense (which we needn't, as Cernuda's familiar demon, on his other appearances, is scarcely distinguishable from Baudelaire's, or Blake's, or Milton's, for that matter) we are still faced with the problem of finding a place for this notion in the conceptual framework of the poem. There would now appear to be, not two antagonistic forces (love and hate), but three, one of which –the daemonic– is unexplained. Or else, following the sense conveyed by grammar, this daemonic power is one and the same with love, in which case the entire meaning of the last stanza changes, and the daemonic force consoles the poet for the sufferings for which the “ansia divina”, and not the malice of

men, is responsible. Neither of these explanations is satisfactory, and it is simpler to conclude that Cernuda miscalculated, slight1y –but only slightly– marring the effect of this bold and moving elegy. Such miscalculations, rusty leftovers, one might think, from the old “maudit” and surrealist armoury, are not unexpected in a transitional volume like Las nubes[39], especially if we consider that this poem was written at a period of anxiety, during the Civil War, in 1937, and when Cernuda's grief that Lorca, of all people, should meet such a fate, was at its height. Scorn, anger, cynicism and a certain morbid fascination with death are not, perhaps, unnatural reactions to the experience of those times. To the same period and state of mind belong the following descriptions of death: “... la muerte, la patria más profunda” [40] “Única realidad clara del mundo”[41] “Única gloria cierta que aún deseo” [42]

But what strikes one about these lines, unlike the offénding lines in “A un poeta muerto”, is, paradoxically, that they affirm rather than deny: “patria”, “realidad” and “gloria” are terms deliberately and skilfully chosen for their positive associations in negative contexts. There is thus a gradual displacement of the reality v. desire opposition in favour of the more essential struggle between life and love, on the one hand, and death and hatred on the other. In context, these lines mean something a little different from what they suggest when read in isolation. The first, from the first “Elegía española”, is mocking: “... los hombres hoy vivos A quienes veo por el odio impulsados Hasta ofrecer sus almas A la muerte, la patria más profunda.”

The poem thus comments sardonically on the cruelty and folly of the two sides engaged in fighting a war each claims will save the country, while their actions are effectively tearing the country apart. The lines are wholly ironic (one can only wonder at Jaime Gil de Biedma's confident assertion: “No hay ironía en Cernuda”, in his excellent essay)[43] and one may even assume that “profunda” here is to be read as a pun (the “patria de los muertos” is precisely six feet under). In any event, the words scarcely reveal the Romantic death-wish, as has been claimed[44]. The same comment, with some reservations, may also apply to the other two poems. “Soñando la muerte” employs a technique of progression by metaphor, superimposing the repetition of the word “blanco” upon an eery litany of destruction harking back to the method, and to some of the obsessions, of “Un río, un amor”. The final line is juxtaposed with the negatives preceding it, the cumulative sense being, approximately, that when everything desirable is being denied and obliterated, only death is evidently real. There is no sense of moral or spiritual identification with death; on the contrary, death is ambiguotis (“sombra enigmática”). This can only be the intellect, coldly examining experiénce: the emotions are clearly on the side of “la blanca juventud ... / Manchada y rota”, “la blanca verdad ... traicionada” and “la blanca inspiración ... perdida”. All of this seems to indicate

rather an existentialist dialectic than either Harris's “ultimate evasion”[45] or Villena's “rebelión del poeta... vitalista, ufana del mundo a pesar de su caducidad”[46]. Finally, “Elegía española II” takes up the theme of the first, though now from exile. Crucially, the last stanza begins with two protases which are left dangling until the end: “Si nunca más pudieran estos ojos Enamorados reflejar tu imagen. Si nunca más pudiera por tus bosques... “[47]

This want of apodosis makes it almost certain that the closing lines are to be read as a pisaller. The poet desires topreserve for ever in his memory what he has loved, and if deprivation is to be the alternative, then death would be a positive relief (“gloria cierta”) from the pain of separation. (In passing, we might notice a possible reminiscence, in the lines “Tú, nada más, fuerte torre en ruinas/ Puedes poblar mi soledad humana”, of Gérard de Nerval's “El Desdichado”: “Je suis le ténébreux, le veuf, l'inconsolé, Le prince d'Aquitaine á la tour abolie ... ”.)

Again, the effect is to intensify the positive emotional involvement. The poet affirms his tragic sense of loss: he does not exhibit moral debility or exhaustion of the vital powers. This, of course, is a matter of the balance of feeling in the poems, or, if one prefers, of the energy with which the conflicting sentiments are charged by the erosion of grammatical categories. Syntactic foreshortening is, despite the predominantly meditative tone of these lyrics, the vehicle by which Cernuda achieves these peculiar emotional effects. Pun in the first instance, metaphorical juxtaposition in the second, and the incomplete condition overshadowing the whole of the third poem, allow Cernuda to explore a greater range of responses to the extreme 'situations than common diction or common syntax would admit. It is hardly surprising that, in the Civil War poems of Las nubes, life and death do not have their plaín peace time meanings. Indeed, there is a certain amount of wordplay involved in the use of the two terms, for if “life” is desirable and “death” abhorrent, as a general principle, then the life of wartime, life-denying, is “death”, and death, by denying that which denies life, is “life”. One such transposition of concepts, very “Metaphysical” in its operation, occurs in the elegy on Lorca: “La muerte se diría Más viva que la vida Porque tú estás con ella” [48]

and, though less bold, these two examples imply a similar sort of conceit: “Eres tú, son tus ojos lo que busca Quien te llama luchando con la muerte ” [49] “Quien habla ya a los muertos, Mudo le hallan los que viven. ” [50]

This does not, however, preclude a certain damaging morbidity which is occasionally apparent, very notably, for example, in “Niño muerto”. The pathetic story of Iñaki Sobrino and his death in an Oxford hospital in the presence of Cernuda, is movingly told by Martínez

Nadal[51] as a prelude to the poem, which the critic obviously considers an exceptional instance of spontaneous sincerity. In fact, the exact parallels between the prose account and the poem confirm one's instinctive impression of mawkishness, of a too obvious enlisting of a too readily available sympathy. The piece is, properly speaking, merely piteous, and therefore beyond adequate artistic expression: there can be no question of controlling the emotions it evolces, and so the result is embarrassment. One can speak about such calamities and narrate them and feel their effect most acutely, but one feels that they are ultimately too painful and too private for art. Cernuda was too obviously affected by the experience, far too close to Iñaki's unique sufferings, to calculate the effect upon the reader, which is close to revulsion. Derek Harris is, therefore, quite right to castigate what he describes as “a reflection of the pessimism en gendered by war and exile”[52]. Moreover, his ingenious explanation that there are two different concepts of death in Las nubes –the destructive concept provoked by war, and the positive aspect of death as the moment when the visible and invisible realities “coincide, bringing perfection and meaning to life”[53]- has a very obvious bearing on what we have been saying here, and shows the complexity of Cernuda's thought at this period. Nevertheless, such errors of taste, or complacent immersions in the necrophiliac tendencies which war can engender, are not typical of the collection as a whole. It needs to be repeated that Cernuda's characteristic attitude is not one of withdrawal; that, on the contrary, his poetry is most essentially a poetry of experience. And it is in Las nubes that the seeds of what is possibly the most deliberate and cerebral poetry written in Spanish this century are sown. This is partly brought about by concentration on a set of themes which, though they are not new in Cernuda's poetry, are now dealt with consciously and, as we suggested earlier, conscientiously, in the meditative manner so characteristic of his later style. Alongside his metaphysics of love and beauty, we find him returning time and time again to the themes of God, Spain, and time as an active and hostile force in human affairs. We shall have more to say in later chapters on the other themes, but something should be said at this stage about Cernuda's religious preoccupation. Notwithstanding the pagan romanticism of the immediately preceding period, and Cernuda's reputation as an irreligious, even a blasphemous, poet, Las nubes shows considerable evidence of the continuing dominance of Christian thought over his moral feelings. He himself has commented on the intermittent nature of these solicitations mis creencias, como las campanas en la leyenda de la ciudad sumergida, sonando en ocasiones, me han dado pruebas a veces, con su intermitencia, de que acaso eran también legendarias y fantasmales; pero acaso también de que subsistían ocultas. Así, tras de (sic) largos períodos inoperantes, en momentos de “Sturm und Drang”, después de la Guerra Civil, por ejemplo, o durante la peripecia amorosa que refieren los “Poemas para un cuerpo”, surgían a su manera, según mi necesidad. Por eso mismo, ¿no parecerán sino reflejo egoísta de esa necesidad mía de ellas, sin que merezcan propiamente el nombre de creencias? [54]

The disaffection, or nonchalance, apparent in these remarks should not distract us from the evidence: in this and subsequent collections, he frequently returns to themes directly or indirect1y Christian in inspiration, quite different in emphasis from both the early aesthetic

surrealist stance and the neo-Romantic viewpoint. The characteristic attitude is one of scepticism, leading on occasion to blasphemous imprecation (“Mas tú no existes. Eres tan sólo el nombre/ Que da el hombre a su miedo y su impotencia”)[55], though out of the anguish that comes from the thought of death and the ephemeral nature of beauty, a precarious hope against hope sometimes springs. Such is the case in “La visita de Dios” and “Atardecer en la catedral”, both of which seek in religion some refuge from pain and the consciousness of mutability, “Una pausa de amor entre la fuga de las cosas. ” [56]

The impulse for “La visita de Dios” is expressed in the first line, echoing Dante: “Pasada se halla ahora la mitad de mi vida”[57]

whilst “Atardecer” lyrically evokes the spiritual solace available to even the most acutely lonely: “Ven a la catedral, alma de soledad temblando.” [58]

This poem is, of the two, the more sincerely and exclusively religious in its philosophy of acceptance: “Todo queda aceptado hasta la muerte Y olvidado tras de la muerte” [59]

“Visita” is more dramatic, the reflections on passing time and the inevitability of death emerging from a dispassionate but increasingly sombre consideration of the poet's life in a variety of aspects. Ageing, inhabiting the grim city “alzada para su orgullo por el rico/ Adonde la miseria canta por las esquinas”, he reflects upon his prívate mísery and discovers a sense of solidarity with the anguish of his fellows, of the whole of suffering humanity[60]. He is without hope and without illusions; “Mis zurcidoras de proyectos, mis tejedoras de esperanzas Han muerto. “[61]

staring appalled into “el tiempo, ese blanco desierto ilimitado”. In this extremity, he turns to God –one might almost say, rounds on him: “Pero a ti, Dios, ¿con qué te aplacaremos? Mi sed eras tú, tú fuiste mi amor perdido, Mi casa rota, mi vida trabajada...” [62]

Like Unamuno, he pleads for the continuation of life, but this life, his life in this world; he begs for immortality not for the soul, but for the body: “No golpees airado mi cuerpo con tu rayo.”

But, unlike the Basque poet, and despite the violence of the preceding image, he subscribes to the view of a God olympically unconcerned with the affairs of men, aloof in his ataraxia, in his “divina indiferencia”. The closing lines are virtually a threat: “Si ellas” (la hermosura, la verdad, la justicia) “murieran hoy, de la memoria te borrarías Como un sueño remoto de los hombres que fueron.”

The differences in tone and attitude between the two poems are thus quite marked. One is embittered, despairing, implacable; the other is intimate, serene, almost voluptuous in its evocation of the coolness and quiet of the cathedral: “Con el vivir callado de las cosas Sobre el haz inmutable de la tierra, Transcurren estas horas en el templo. ” [63]

The poem tends towards ecstasy, even if it is the ecstasy of ungovernable grief, and the absolute inwardness of the experience is wonderfully caught in the line: “Llanto escondido moja el alma” [64]

a further demonstration of the metaphysical strain increasingly present in Cernuda's poetry of this period. Both half-lines play on the opposition between material and spiritual which characterises the whole composition, so that this moving and powerful line brings the poem towards its life-enhancing close (“Afírmando la vida tal savia de la tierra”). This word, “tierra” is the signal for descent, but there is a pentecostal ring to the last. lines, and for once the poet féels hirnself reconciled to th e process of living, though with renewed confidence, among his fellow men: “El soplo animador de nuestro mundo Pasa y orea la noche de los hombres.” [65]

We have mentioned Unamuno, and it must be said that his influence on Cernuda's thought at this time is incalculable. We know, from Cernuda's having told US[66], that among the few books he managed to take with him to London was an anthology including poems by Unamuno and Machado, both of whom Cernuda re-read in England. Indeed, the whole of “Atardecer” closely parallels Unamuno's “La Catedral de Barcelona”, from the descriptive passages (“y es sólo sombra/Sombra cuajada en formas de misterio/Entre la luz humilde que se filtra”) to certain details connected with the effect of the peace of the church on the individual and the deepening shadows and the quality of the light filtering through the windows. Such echoes are hard1y surprising, since Cernuda was attracted not only by the sensuous, and tragic, philosophy of Unamuno, but by the quálity of his poetry. He went as far as to declare (in 1954) that Unamuno was “probablemente el mayor poeta que España ha tenido en lo que va de siglo”66b. Though Cernuda's criticism is occasionally marred by capriciousness and indiscipline, it is unlikely that this remark was made casually, and, notwithstanding the fame of Machado, Jiménez and Lorca, it is possibly even true. What distinguishes Unamuno's poetry from that of the majority of his contemporaries and successors is the tenacity with which he pursues his theme and, to be blunt, the quality of his, thought. As a result, and speaking very generally, form is less important to him than content. This, Cernuda feels to be a defect, but he adds perceptively: Debo advertir que al hablar de la rudeza de Unamuno como poeta, al indicar esos defectos elementales que tan pronto se advierten, no quiero decir que le quiten valor a sus versos, excepto en determinados momentos [67].

In English literature, we may think of Tourneur or Donne, or, nearer our own time, Browning

or Lawrence, as examples of poets who similarly contrive to make virtues of apparent defects of the ear, and it is hard1y an accident that they, like Unamuno, are all embattled poets, polemicists, exponents of the dramatic rather than the purely lyrical. Such preferences are unSpanish, or at least not typical of Spanish poetry as a whole; but the revulsion of critical feeling in Cernuda away from verbal iconography and towards a more deliberately meditative style helps to explain his high opinion of Unamuno, while Unamuno's example, in turn, helps to account for Cernuda's mature practice. Moreover, it is as well to bear in mind that Unamuno, in his time, underwent the influence of Leopardi –evident in such poems as “Aldabarán” and “El Cristo yacente de Santa Clara de Palencia”– and was virtually alone in his admiration of the English poets, Wordsworth in particular. As examples of the tone and diction which Cernuda caught, consider the following from the second of the two poems mentioned: “De su boca entreabierta negra como el misterio indescifrable fluye hacia la nada, a la que nunca llega, disolvimiento.”

or “Y ¿cómo ha de dolerle el pensamiento si es só1o carne muerta ... ?”

This is the same voice we hear in so many of Cernuda's poems of this period that it would be an almost endless task to collate them all here. It will be sufficient for our purpose if, in addition to the tone, the key premises of Las nubes be admitted to bear a resemblance to those of certain poems of Unamuno: the dramatic presentation of the predicament of man, in love with what vanishes, desperately seeking a source of hope or of solace, either in God or in the tragic assumption of a purely human solidarity, a faithfulness to the here and now of individuality and present reality: “Nunca separes tu dolor del común dolor humano, busca el íntimo, aquel en que radica la hermandad que te liga con tu hermano, el que agranda la mente y no la achica” (“Dolor común”)

cries Unamuno, and Cernuda, more quietly, sighs: “Por mi dolor comprendo que otros inmensos sufren Hombres callados a quienes falta el ocio Para arrojar al cielo su tormento.”[68]

The tensions implicit in such a position give increased force and point to the poetry, so that in a very real sense, Cernuda and Unamuno, as someone has said, feel their thoughts and think their feelings[69]. Such overlapping of emotion and intellect gives Cernuda's later poetry that depth and complexity which we think of as peculiarly modern, but which is probably inseparable from any valuable poetry of whatever period. In Cernuda's case, this is further

enriched by his almost religious -or mystical, insofar as this differs from the religious, sensu strictu– conception of the poets' task. An intensely felt solitude (which Silver, perhaps a shade grandiloquently, refers to as “ontological solitude”,[70]) seems to be the origin and the most persistent basis of Cernuda´s communication, and we are not surprised to find him glorifying it as the poetic adjunct par excellence. Such is the sense of these lines from “Cordura”, in setting the most English of his early English pieces: “Un sueño, que conmigo El puso para siempre Me aísla. Así está el chopo Entre encinas robustas. Duro es hallarse solo En medio de los cuerpos. Pero esa forma tiene Su amor: la cruz sin nadie.” [71]

We should notice that it is extreme isolation, or isolation acutely felt, that produces, by contrast. the feeling of community (“amor”) and, ultimately, communication itself (the poem). Conversely, the evidence of men's instinctive solidarity tends to heighten our sense of the poet's solitariness, which is no longer aloofness, as in the earlier collections, but a consciousness of predestined, and therefore tragic, separation: “Voces tranquilas hay De hombres hacia lo lejos, Que el suelo están labrando Como hicieron los padres. Sus manos, si se extienden Hallan manos amigas. “

There is a clear, though unstated, contrast established between the tranquil tillers of the soil and the anguished spiritual toil of the poet. It is as though the fertility of the earth and the fertility of the mind were being set side by side for comparison. But the crucial stage of the poem is reached with the appearance of the religious theme: “Allá sobre la lluvia, Donde anidan estrellas, Dios por su cielo mira Dulces rincones grises. Todo ha sido creado, Como yo, de la sombra: Esta tierra a mí ajena, Estos cuerpos ajenos. ”

Heaven, which in “A Larra, con unas violetas” [72] was alluded to in the phrase “Allá hasta la región celeste e impasible”, is still “allá”, and though God sits enthroned there, his attitude is scarcely less indifferent. But the repetition “ajena/ajenos” referring to the land and its inhabitants confirms our earlier impression that the celestial vision is a gloomy extrapolation of the terrestrial, whence it would seem to follow that the title, “Cordura”, is at least partly ironic, more a matter of resignation than of confirmed hope. The concluding stanzas intensify these contradictions, so that rather than treating his subject ambiguously, Cernuda seems to

be speaking of and from ambiguity itself, from the absolute relativity of the subjetc and the object of thought. This conflict is resolved in the creation of the poem, conceived as the product of a category superior to the categories of logic. Hence, though one may agree, on the whole, with Harris's remark that "the attempt to find solace in a conventional religious belief represents another effort by Cernuda to overcome his sense of alienation, now greatly intensified by exile” [73] it is more difficult to share his view that “Cordura” illustrates this. The English critic takes it that “the empty cross brings to mind his distaste for sad, crucified gods” and rejects Silver's reading that “the dream mentioned is that of the perfect love, and the "cruz sin nadie" is the agony of desire that conflicts with the dream” [74]. If one follows Harris in finding Silver's interpretation “unlikely”, it is principally because Silver does not explain how he arrives at his conclusions. Harris makes it clear that Silver is wrong, in his view, because he has misread “la cruz sin nadie”. But Silver is surely right to attempt to link the dream which isolates the poet with the image of the cross (thus making more of these stanzas than mere “conventional religious belief”) and to interpret the image of the cross as a symbol of agony. Reading this poem in the light of Cernuda's other religious pieces, and according to the word “sueño” all the accumulative significance it has gathered in his poetry, it is possible to conclude that the isolation “Cordura” refers to is the consequence of the speaker's possession of the poetic gift, and that the suffering is the suffering consequent upon the poet's abnegation and responsibility, also referred to as a process akin to dissolution of the personality “Adonde el fénix nace y muere.” [75]

On this view, the phrase “la cruz sin nadie” would mean, not the empty cross, but “alone and crucified”, the emphasis being on the solitariness of the sufferer. (Martínez Nadal's reading of the phrase[76] is that the cross Cernuda here has in mind is the Protestant cross, which does not show the figure of Christ. This is ingenious, but perhaps does not adequately account for the emotion with which the phrase is charged nor for the almost cryptic significance which Cernuda seems anxious to attach to it.) Through a similar experience of suffering the poet hopes to win “conunión con los hombres. as well as favour in the eyes of God, a view lent support in the fast stanza, where he specifically refers to the “alma aislada en lucha”. The ambiguity of his desire for this double salvation, and of the entire poem, is illustrated in the last line: “La noche será breve.”

On its own, this would appear to be optimistic, Christian resignation, but in the context of the stanza, abounding in images of gloom (“sendas sombrías”, “se duele el viento”, alma aislada en lucha”), and bearing in mind that the first stanza sets the scene in late autumn or early winter, when the nights are longer than the days, we are left wondering whether the poem looks forward to the dawn, or, on the contrary, bewails the brevity of the respite in the

speaker's sufferings. If this is piety, it is emphatically not the piety of the daily missal. Two further poems with religious themes from Las nubes help to place Cernuda's intermittent Christianity in perspective[77]. Both “Lázaro” and “La adoración de los magos” present well knownbiblical episodes as if they were historical facts; both are attempts to discover contemporary relevance in these classic myths of bodily resurrection and the salvation of the soul. They open with prosaic, factual statements, designed to underline the realism of the speaker and the reality of the events, and to play down the mystical aspects: “Era de madrugada. Después de retirada la piedra con trabajo” [78] “La soledad. La noche. La terraza. La luna silenciosa en las columnas.” [79]

However, the meditative tone soon asserts itself: the real business of the poems is moral and spiritual. Both consider the anguish of individuals who have lost the capacity for faith, but not the desire to believe, and who have preserved their lucidity alongside their despair, after the fashion of Dostoievsky and Camus. Desire, in this context, becomes pure nostalgia, being converted into its opposite, memory, as hope is rendered impossible with the new consciousness of death as the ultimate reality: “No el terso cuerpo oscuro, rosa de los deseos, Sino el cuerpo de un hijo de la muerte.” [80]

As usual in Cernuda, the images are pre-eminently physical even when the sense is spiritual. That both are intended becomes clear when Lazarus is made to confess to “asco de mi cuerpo y de mi alma.”

However, we must be careful of oversimplifying. Is it merely a matter, as Harris holds, of world-weariness, disgust with life, evasion? “Lazarus” he tells us, “has not been brought fully back to life, only returned to a spiritually dead existence from which he thought he had escaped”[81]. But Lazarus himself puts it slightly differently: Sentí de nuevo el sueño, la locura Y el error de estar vivo, Siendo carne doliente día a día.”

Lazarus, then, expresses not the new but the continuing incompleteness of life: it is life itself, and not resurrection, which is madness, dream, error. Fullness of life is not even considered as a possibility: it is in the nature of things that such desire will always come up against the bitter reality of “death-in-life and life-in-death”, and the only hope is in love, compassion, or ultimate resignation: “Entonces, hondos bajo una frente, vi unos ojos Llenos de compasión, y hallé temblando un alma Donde mi alma se copiaba inmensa, Por el amor duefla del mundo.”

Lazarus'final attitude is one of resignation to his ignorance, though it points forward to the aesthetic solace that is to occupy Cernuda, in his quest of immortality, in later volumes: “Trabajando, no por mi vida ni mi espíritu,

Mas por una verdad en aquellos ojos entrevista Ahora. La hermosura es paciencia.” [82]

Lucid scepticism, then, or passionate doubt are the informing spirit of Cernuda's religious poetry, which avoids any suggestion of dogmatism in favour of any posture whatsoever: “si yo vivo Bien puede un Dios vivir sobre nosotros. Mas nunca nos consuela un pensamiento, Sino la gracia muda de las cosas.” [83]

Melchior, like his creator, can face the idea of a life lived under the sentence of death, and is prepared to see the presumption of any other hope in man, when nature constantly furnishes him with emblems of his inevitable fate. All he prays for is peace, and reconciliation with the insensible world of nature: “Señor, danos la paz de los deseos Satisfechos, de las vidas cumplidas. Ser tal la flor que nace y luego abierta Respira en paz, cantando bajo cl cielo Con luz de sol, aunque la muerte exista: La cima ha de anegarse en la ladera.” [84]

But resignation does not come easy, and it is the yearning for meaningful existence, the misery of consciousness in a world in which plenitude seems to be the privilege of inanimate nature, and, most particulary, the knowledge that all will perish, conscious and unconscious life alike, that drives the Magi on their quest, and implants in them the desire to believe, hope in God. Derek Harris has admirably analysed this quest and the kings' ultimate disillusionment, suggesting that the characterisation of Melchior as the thinker haunted by the idea of mortality, Balthazar as the cynic and believer in Realpolitik, and Gaspar as the hedonist, represent different facets of Cernuda's own personality[85]. It might be added that, although the general sense of the poem is perfectly clear, there remain certain ambiguities. Some of these are deliberate. There is the fact that we do not know for certain which of the kings met with which fate; and that we have only the word of an unnamed witness, the writer of the epitaph, that “Buscaron la verdad, pero al hallarla No creyeron en ella”,

which partially contradicts the unreliable testimony of the shepherd: “Buscaban un dios nuevo, y dicen que le hallaron.”

We are also left unsure whether the disasters that overtook them are ironic confirmation of the folly of their illusion, or, on the contrary, a suggestion of a profound change (wavering faith? indifference to common destiny?) brought about by the miraculous event. Such ambiguities are stimulating and enrich the texture of the poem, as well as confirming Cernuda's decidedly agnostic stance on religious matters. But other ambiguities seem to derive from defects in the poem's structure. Are we supposed to read the long speeches in Part II (“Los reyes”) as dialogue or monologue, or a mixture of both? At odd points in their

speeches, the kings remember to use plural verb forms, and the closing lines are clearly angry exchanges, but the long pronouncements that make up most of the section are clumsy and heavyhanded if they are intended to be dramatic dialogue. Furthermore, the “tripartite division” of the poet's personality referred to by Harris is evident only in the second section, the rest of the poem being heavily weighted towards Melchior's point of view. Despite Coleman's view[86] that the third section “Palinodia de la esperanza divina”, represents a combination of the three voices, the style, sentiments and overall attitude seem to belong to Melchior: “Hallamos una vida como la nuestra humana, Gritando lastimosa, con ojos que miraban Dolientes, bajo el peso de su alma Sometida al destino de las almas, Cosecha que la muerte ha de segarla.” [87]

Finally, the “Epitafio”, with its abrupt apostrophe and its unexpected reference to the gods (“No compadezcas/Su sino, más feliz que el de los dioses/Sempiternos arriba”) serves rather to disorient the reader than to round off the poem. It looks very much like authorial intrusion, and one is startled, and somewhat dismayed, at this decree of what James called “the mere muffled majesty” of the omniscient author, in a poem which has been striving towards objectivity. In the same way, the brief and quite unnecessary appearance of the devil in the first section, with his puerile attempt at irony (“Gloria a Dios en la altura del cielo/Tierra sobre los hombres en su infierno”) seems ill-considered, and recalls the facile Satanism of “A un poeta muerto” and other compositions. The reasons for this relative failure, then, seem to lie not in confusion of thought, or in a discrepancy between the poet's avowed and his real attitude, but in technical errors of calculation and occasional emotional indiscipline or errors of critical taste. To understand the technical problems Cernuda faced in writing the poems of Las nubes and the question of the development of his style generally, it will be necessary to look ahead to the later poems of the collection and the direction taken by Cernuda's meditative lyrics. If one accepts Paz's remark –and it is difficult to see how one can help seeing the force of it– that “La realidad y el deseo”. represents a “sucesión de momentos vividos y reflexión sobre esas experiencias vitales” [88], it becomes necessary to enquire into the experiences themselves, but also into the effect of the successiveness of the reflections. If time affects language, language undoubtedly affects time. This is especially true in the case of the meditative poet, who is scarcely permitted the luxury of semantically neutral or unmarked terms, including, within limits, words which are merely functional grammatically. What we call intensity or purity of poetic style is our sense of the strict and inevitable coherence of each part to the whole, the infinitely complex pattern of correspondences set up between each successive utterance, so that our awareness of the successiveness is lessened, or vanishes utterly. And it is a remarkable fact –since Spanish literature is not, on the whole, rich in poets of this kind– that all the poets, of whatever

nationality, whom Cernuda is known to have admired, are poets possessing in abundance this “volonté de style”. Moreover, from his prose writings it is clear that the problem preoccupied him from quite an early stage. Referring to the intervals of sterility between bursts of creative activity, he writes: poco a poco fui viendo cómo, lejos de ser períodos estériles, eran períodos de descanso y de renuevo, igual que los del sueño lo son para el cuerpo y, después de ellos, al volver a escribir, observaba que mi trabajo se había enriquecido y transformado. De lo cual comprendí que no sólo eran provechosos, sino necesarios, resultando en el crecimiento y desarrollo de la mente [89].

Although he is not referring exclusively to the development of his style, the emphasis placed on renewal, enrichment, transformation, growth, etc., allow us to infer that Cernuda attached at least as much importance to his reflections on poetry (his own and others') as to the specific theme or group of subjects that awoke in him the urge to write. Thus, it is easy to see that some of the most important experiences recorded in this “spiritual biography” [90] are the outcome of this continual reconsideration on the nature and possibilities of poetry. Cernuda is one of the most profoundly experimental poets in Spanish literature this century. His work is as remarkable for its variety as for its depth, and he was at all times receptive to the work of similarly enquiring minds. It is, therefore, hardly an accident that some of his most original poetry was written after he left the comparatively provincial atmosphere of Spain and came into continuous direct contact with a wider concept of European culture [91]. The horror of the Civil War and the bitterness of exile form the background to Las nubes, as well as providing the volume with considerable thematic unity; but exile had the further effect of bringing about those technical developments and that beneficial immersion in the major currents of western literature which led him to full maturity, and this in turn produced in him a deeper and more precise understanding of the literature of his own country. From Las nubes onwards, the predominant influences are Anglo-Saxon, reflecting both Cernuda's new linguistic horizons and his continuing search for fresh sources of inspiration and new means of expression. In Historial de un libro, he refers to his contact with English poetry as “la experiencia más considerable de mis años maduros”[92], adding that his time in England “corrigió y completó algo de lo que en mí y en mis versos requería dicha corrección y compleción” (sic). The main virtues, in his eyes, of English poetry were its plainness, its directness and its conciseness, as against the verbosity and inflation of the Spanish and French baroque styles, and he felt that this subdued English style daba al poema contorno exacto, donde nada faltaba ni sobraba”[93]. In particular, he recalls reading Shakespeare, Blake and Keats, then Browning and the moderns, especially Yeats and Eliot. We may add to this list the names of Donne, Herbert, Marvell and the Metaphysicals generally, Wordsworth, Shelley and, probably, Tennyson, though the trace left by many of these poets is not clearly apparent until a later stage. As far as Las nubes is concerned, the most important technical innovations, as we have noted above, are the tendencies towards objectivity and towards dramatic, as opposed to lyrical,

presentation. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to a brief, preliminary examination of the connection between these innovations and Cernuda's reading of the English poets. We have already suggested that the immediacy and intensity of the experiences of social upheaval, national and personal disaster, and exile, needed a more direct form of expression than those which Cernuda, and most of his contemporaries, had employed hitherto. Indeed, though it is very often claimed that surrealism, as a technique, is an attempt to grapple with the crisis of social, political and moral values apparent in the early century, it often strikes the modern ear (or eye) rather as evidence of confusion than of clarity of thought. Cernuda's critical awareness commonly kept pace with, or was even in advance of, his practice at any given time, and this gives the peculiarly satisfying sense of a mind in evolution that one has in reading the first seven or eight books of La realidad y el deseo. This does not, of course, imply a continuous improvement: aesthetically, Perfil del aire and Donde habite el olvido are superior to the volumes which follow them, respectively Egloga, Elegía, Oda and Invocaciones, but that is another question. Just as Donde habite el olvido and Invocaciones leave surrealism behind, Las nubes is decidedly post-Romantic in comparison with the neoRomantic collections which preceded it. Moreover, Cernuda's neo-Romanticism has a strong northern rather than Mediterranean flavour, his principal sources, as is generally recognised, being Bécquer, Leopardi (himself an avid reader and imitator of the German and English poets) and Hölderlin. With his reading of the English Romantics and moderns about this period, Cernuda underwent the fast and most decisive of the stages of his literary apprenticeship. As he himself has put it: “Así fue el norte completando en mí, meridional, la gama de emociones sensoriales.[94]. He does well to stress the progressive nature of this experience, for, as Las nubes shows, the process of assimilation was intermittent and, in some respects, difficult. Intermittent, because a number of compositions (“La fuente”, “Canción de invierno”, “Alegría de la soledad”, “El amor y el amante”, “Jardín antiguo”) hark back, in conception and style, to earlier collections. The poem “La fuente” is Cernuda's first attempt to bring a moral purpose into his poetry by stressing the ethical lessons implicit in natural objects (and the fact that the object chosen here is not strictly natural, but a man-made contrivance, an artefact, is surely significant). Previously in the scene poems, he had always deployed a suitably discreet and sensitive observer, generally indistinguishable from the poet's self, between the reader and the landscape, but here the fountain is allowed to speak for itself, and it proves to be extremly loquacious, and not a little pompous: “Al pie de las estatuas por el tiempo vencidas Mientras copio su piedra, cuyo encanto ha fijado Mi trémulo esculpir de líquidos momentos, Única entre las cosas, muero y renazco siempre”[95]

It refers also to “mi suspiro diáfano” and “mi azul ímpetu helado”, informing us in its unremittingly neoclassical way that the “apaciguados dejos/De las viejas pasiones, glorias, duelos de antaño” are “misterios junto al vano rumor de los efímeros”.

Coleman, undeterred by this flow, offers us the following comment: the fountain affirms that the precipitous existence of the water that is sent skyward, pausing for a microsecond in perfect equilibrium between the initial thrust and the gravitational force that will bring it to earth again, is an exact physical correlation of our own life to the infinite number of years that have passed and are about to come[96].

Passing over the space age terminology, and ignoring the fact that infinite numbers are never about to do anything, one is struck by the American critic's use of the word “exact” here. For exact is what this poem is clearly not. The hackneyed phrases, the excessive use of adjectives and the general turgidity of expression, all contribute towards an impression of dullness and want of focus. Moreover, the danger of having an object speak in the first person is that our willing suspension of disbelief, always a precarious thing, quickly turns to scepticism in the face of verbal excess. A fountain that is not only self-important, but downright bombastic, is not a fountain we feel we want to know better, and despite incidental beauties of expression, the poem comes perilously close to absurdity. Having said this, one does see the poet's intention, which is twofold: first, the conviction that certain manifestations of reality demonstrate the existence of a moral design in the universe; and second, objectivity in the presentation, so that only what is essential (the sense of man's insignificance) remains, and what is incidental (a particular man's emotion in the face of this fact) is effaced. This strikes one as being an attempt to graft Browning's technique on to Wordsworth's vision, but without the dexterity of the first or the grandeur (not grandiloquence) of the second. The thought expressed in the last line: “Confusión de la muerte resuelta en melodía”

is Cernuda's individual contribution, and continues his attempt in this series to come to terms with death, this time by subsuming it into the overall harmony of nature. But the uncharacteristic slackness of expression and the technical awkwardness together sink the poem into confusion which no melody can resolve. Before leaving this poem, we might notice that the sculpture image applied to water seems to have been a favourite of Cernuda's at this period. The phrase “Mi trémulo esculpir de líquidos momentos”

recalls this, from “A un poeta muerto”: “el afán del agua A quien no basta esculpirse en las olas”;

and the idea reappears in “El ruiseñor sobre la piedra” where El Escorial is described as “Agua esculpida... Música helada en piedra.”

This is interesting, as it not only illustrates the continuity with some of Cernuda's very earliest poems in Perfil del aire, but also reveals the extent to which he remained unconsciously faithful to the static, precious tradition of Spanish poetry since Góngora, even when he was consciously seeking a more dynamic (because dramatic) and a plainer style. We have noticed how this ponderous style –perhaps ultimately deriving from the raptness of

attitude characteristic of his earliest poetry– can work against the structural unity of the poem, as in “La adoración de los magos”. This may have been what Octavio Paz had in mind when he complained of –la afectación, cierto amaneramiento del que nunca se desprendió del todo”[97], and of an overall tendency in Cernuda's mature poetry towards inflation and wordiness– precisely, we note, the faults Cernuda felt the English poets had helped him to eliminate. We shall return to this accusation later when dealing with the later poetry. Meanwhile, it may not be amiss to see how, on at least one occasion, the hybrid style of Las nubes becomes a powerful fusion of Romantic elevation and modern detachment. The poem “Violetas”, is perhaps the clearest illustration of Ricardo Gullón's remark that Las nubes is “un libro compuesto con sentimientos románticos y formas clásicas”[98]. Like “la fuente”, “Violetas” presupposes an ethical intention behind natural phenomena, but this time there is no intrusive self-consciousness to spoil the effect. The standpoint, then, is not one of complete neutrality (it is doubtful whether Cernuda ever imagined such a possibility), for obviously some mind must be making the assumption on which the poem rests. But the point is that there is no need, no justification for identifying this consciousness with the poet's own. The flowers are described in their beauty and fragility, and their superiority to “un fresco labio humano” is established on the ground that “Nada prometen que después traicionen.”[99]

The poem then concludes: “Al marchar victoriosas a la muerte Sostienen un momento, ellas tan frágiles, El tiempo entre sus pétalos, Así su instante alcanza, Norma para lo efímero que es bello, A ser vivo embeleso en la memoria.”

This stanza skilfully weaves into a complete and harmonious pattern the strands of hope and despair and the desire for immortality, or some equally encompassing vision, which we have seen to be the most consistent concern of the entire collection. But the vision here achieved is wholly modern, since the very notion of perfection is inseparable from that of transitoriness, in opposition to the classical or Renaissance view that value reposes in constancy. One thinks of Keats's “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”; whilst the aesthetic nature of the experience adumbrated in “vivo embeleso en la memoria” recalls Wordsworth's daffodils. In this poem, therefore, there is no question of posturing as there was in “A un poeta muerto”, here, the victory over death is real because it can be experienced through the miraculous powers of memory (and Proust too is relevant here). These Romantic, or perhaps postRomantic sentiments are expressed in three stanzas of classical perfection and regularity: one stanza for description, a second for comparison to the human, and a final one to point the moral. One should also notice that the first line, of only nine syllables, can be rendered regular in reading by allowing the two missing beats to represent the pause effectively required by the sense; and that this pause sets the slow tempo, suggestive of both lingering enjoyment and meditation. This slow rhythm, imposed too by the selection of words containing consonant clusters “oscura”, “insinuándose”, “perla”, “tras”, “verdes”, “valvas”,

etc.), accentuates the feeling of formal control, whilst the opening series of three adjectives is ascending (two syllables, then three, then four), thus anticipating the symmetry of the stanza structure. Finally, the language is completely natural, and free of both bombast and conscious poeticism, so that “Violetas” –like the later “Los espinos” from “Como quien espera el alba”–, perfectly epitomises the mature poetry of Cernuda: plainness of diction, combination of the lyrical and the dramatic, implication of moral intention in natural phenomena, and integration of the time theme with the quest of beauty and immortality, in a synthesis which is still ultimately aesthetic, but now increasingly empirical. Cernuda's intensive reading of the English poets is now beginning to bear fruit. Of the English poets whom Cernuda read at this time, the one who made the greatest impact on him was Browning. In Historial, he records how through Browning, he learnt the value of projecting his experience on to personae, thus increasing both the objectivity and the dramatic potential of his compositions. This, at any rate, was the theory, and we have already seen the effectiveness of the technique in “Lázaro”, which Harris, rightly, one feels, compares to Browning's “A Death in the Desert”, on the death of John the Baptist[100]. But Cernuda had not fully digested Browning's method at this stage –and we shall be considering in the next chapter whether he ever did– as is apparent in “La adoración de los magos” and “Resaca en Sansueña”. The faults already noticed in the first of these (diffuseness, wordiness, flatness of dialogue, vagueness of thought)[101] are even more marked in the second, which is in fact the earlier composition. The legend of the drowned statue (which is an attempt to rework as a poem the prose piece “El indolente”, written in 1929[102]) begins promisingly, as the statue recalls how “Uno a uno los siglos morosos del destierro Pasaron sobre mí.”

But if we imagined we were in the presence of a new poem on the experience of exile and its effects on the individual mind, we are soon disappointed. The poem sheers away, on to a familiar tack: the rather wearisome Götterdamerung theme, with its predictable genuflexions to pagan myth, and the verbosity associated with the Hölderlinesque poems of Invocaciones. Preceding and following this interlude are two sections of fine description and evocation of the Mediterranean coast at daybreak and nightfall, neither of which carries the poem any further forward. In what looks like a mixture of desperation and defiance on Cernuda's part, the concluding lines read: “Aquí acaba el poema. Podéis reír, marcharos. Su fábula fue escrita como la flor se abre.”[103]

The reference to “algún edén remoto”, which Philip Silver takes as further confirmation of his thesis[104] is unmotivated and pointless, and the subtitle of the poem, “Fragmentos de un poema dramático”, is misleading. There is no drama, and one cannot easily see how these “ fragments” could ever have formed a whole of any interest. The speaking statue seems as far as possible removed from Browning's idea of “action in character”, or even the symbolic

value of Shelley “Ozymandias” (later used as the source, together with Eliot's famous line, for the poem “Desolación de la quimera”). But we are anticipating. There are quite a number of details of technique and expression in the later poems of Las nubes which hint at Anglo-Saxon sources, but they require more specific comment, and it will therefore be best if we consider them in the relevant chapters. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show the general trend of the poetry of this crucial transitional volume, and to suggest the sort of influences which Cernuda was now increasingly open to and the ends he was pursuing. It is time to turn to an examination of Browning's presence in La realidad y el deseo.

[1] For a discussion of what is involved in the term “surrealism” as applied to the poetry of Cernuda and others of the “Generación del 27”, see Vittorio Bodini, Los poetas surrealistas españoles, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1976, esp. pp. 10 and 88; and Antonio Blanch, La poesía pura española, Madrid, Gredos, 1976, esp. pp. 76-9. The former tends to exclude, the latter to admit, Cernuda's membership of the Spanish surrealist school. [2] For an interesting account of Cernuda's British years, see Rafael Martínez Nadal, Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda (Madrid, Hiperión, 1983). [3] Prosa Completa, pp. 898-939. Hereafter referred to as Prosa, this is the edition published by Derek Harris and Luis Maristany, in the Biblioteca Crítica, Barral Editores, Barcelona, 1975. It is completed by their edition of the Poesía Completa (hereafter Poesía) (also Barral, 1975), the edition used here, and rapidly becoming the standard one. [4] Poesía, p. 393. [5] Ibid., p. 186. [6] Ibid., p. 201. [7] “Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea”, Prosa, p. 420. [8] Octavio Paz, one of Cernuda's best critics, feels that the issue is fundamental: “Su sinceridad no es gusto por el escándalo ni desafío a la sociedad (es otro su desafío): es un punto de honor intelectual y moral. Además, se corre el riesgo de no comprender el significado de su obra si se omite o se atenúa su homosexualidad, no porque su poesía pueda reducirse a esa pasión -eso sería tan falso como ignorarla- sino porque ella es el punto de partida de su creación poética”. (O. Paz, La palabra edificante, in Luis Cernuda, Colección El Escritor y la Crítica, ed. D. Harris, Taurus, Madrid, 1977, p. 150.) [9] Dámaso Alonso's refusal to take offence, patent in Poetas españoles contemporáneos (Madrid, Gredos, 1965, 3.a Ed.) does him great credit, but does not quite disarm Juan Goytisolo's pointed criticism of his critica] attitudes, however ilitempered Goytisolo's own remarks may seem. These are to be found in his “Homenaje a Luis Cernuda”, in D. Harris ed. op. cit., Taurus (hereafter Taurus), p. 162 and N. 1 [10] L. A. de Villena, “La rebelión del dandy en Luis Cernuda”, in 3 Luis Cernuda, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, nº 60, 1977, pp. 109-55. [11] Juan Gil-Albert, “Encuentro con Luis Cernuda”, in Taurus, pp. 22-3. [12] Vid. D. Harris, Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry, London, Támesis Books, 1973, passim; A Coleman, Other Voices: A Study of the Late Poetry of Luis Cernuda, Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina Press, n.o 81, 1969, pp. 31 and 61; & Agustín Delgado, La poética de Luis Cernuda, Alfar, Madrid, 1975, e.g. p. 107. [13] Hístorial, Prosa, p. 899. [14] P. Salinas, Ensayo de literatura hispánica, Madrid, 1958, p. 373. [15] Harris, op. cit., p. 7. [16] See Jenaro Taléns, El espacio y las máscaras, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1975, appendix “Hölderlin y Cernuda”, pp. 383-7, for details on Hölderlin. On Leopardi, see D. Harris, op. cit., pp. 74, ff. [17] Prosa, p. 916. [18] We have Cernuda's authority (Prosa, p. 915) for disagreeing with a common preference -possibly arising in Ricardo

Gullón- for this excessively wordy poem. [19] Poesía, 206. [20] Prosa, p. 921. [21] D. Harris, “Una versión primitiva de la elegía de Luis Cernuda porla muerte de Lorca”, Taurus, pp. 286-302. [22] Poesía, p. 207. [23] Poesía, p. 217. [24] Ibid., p. 220. [25] Ibid., p. 224. [26] Prosa, p. 392. In passing, one may note the affinity with Eliot's famous dictum, which appears several times, under various guises, in Cernuda's criticism. [27] C.f. T. McMullan, “Luis Cernuda y la influencia emergente de Pierre Reverdy”, Taurus, esp. pp. 252, ff. [28] Poesía, p. 208. [29] Ibid. [30] Prosa, p. 934. [31] One is perplexed as to why Cernuda, an avid reader of philosophy, should have delayed for so long his reading of the pre-Socratic writers. Either there is a confusion of dates or periods here, or Cernuda knew the famous image of Heraclitus without perhaps being conscious of what had suggested the lines to him. [32] Poesía, p, 211. [33] See my own comments in “Cernuda and the Poetic Imagination: Primeras poesías as Metaphysical Poetry”, Anales de Literatura Española, Univ. de Alicante, nº 1, 1982, pp. 322, ff. [34] J. Olivio Jiménez makes a similar point in “Emoción y trascendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Luis Cernuda”, La Caña Gris (Valencia), 6-8, otoño 1962, p. 77. [35] Poesía, p. 210. [36] Ibid., p. 211. [37] Ibid., p. 210. [38] L. A. de Villena, op. cit., pp. 146-7. [39] Jaime Gil de Biedma, “Comoen sí mismo, al fin", in El pie de la letra, Editorial Crítica, Grijalbo, Barcelona, 1980, p. 338, considers Las nubes Cernuda's best book. [40] Poesía, p. 212. [41] Ibid., p. 217. [42] Ibid., p. 224. [43] Gil de Biedma, op. cit., p. 334. [44] D. Harris, principally, who in his Study brings together a fair sample of the references to death in Las nubes. Though he sees “A sardonic intention in such statements”, Harris, like Villena, loc cit, makes much of “the death-wish in many of the poems of the war and early exile... the idea of death as a consolation for life” (p. 78). [45] Harris, Study, p. 79. [46] Villena, op. cit., p. 146. [47] Poesía, p. 224. [48] Ibid., p. 209. [49] Ibid., p. 213. [50] Poesía, p. 219. [51] Vid. Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 26-7. [52] Harris, Study, p. 79. [53] Ibid., p. 78. [54] Prosa, p. 935. [55] Poesía, p. 283. [56] Ibid., p. 227.

[57] Ibid. [58] Ibid., p. 236. [59] Ibid., p. 237. [60] See also Prosa, p. 918, for his ideas on the social utility of poetry. [61] Poesía, p 228. [62] Ibid, pp. 228-9. [63] Ibid., p. 237. [64] Ibid., p. 238. [65] Ibid. [66] Unamuno was among the few Spanish poets whose work Cernuda was able to re-read in London, as he had a volume of the Basque poet with him in London. See Prosa, p. 920. 66b Ibid., p. 350. [67] Ibid., p. 349. [68] Poesía, p. 228. [69] Eliot's well known remarks on Donne are relevant here. [70] P. Silver, “Et in Arcadia Ego: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda”, London, Támesis Books, 1965. [71] Poesía, p. 239. [72] Ibid., pp. 219-20. [73] Harris, Study, p. 81. [74] Silver, op. cit., p. 112. [75] Poesía, p. 343. [76] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 267. [77] Against the general, and rather careless tendency, to see Cernuda as an atheistic, irreligious or pagan poet, C. P. Otero points out that Cernuda's feeling for Nature reveals “una emoción hondamente religiosa”; “libre de todo compromiso, cl sentimiento religioso mana en él de las zonas más profundas del ser”, though “no es cosa de fórmula ni de mayúsculas en ciertas palabras,” (“Poeta de Europa”, Taurus. p. 134). At times, this generally pantheistic drift of his religious thought could touch on specifically Christian themes, in a way that occasionally suggests a far more conventional Cernuda than some critics are prepared to see. in any case, the matter requires a more detailed treatment than we can dispense here. [78] Poesía, p. 246. [79] Ibid., p. 255. [80] Ibid., p. 247. [81] Harris, Study, p. 77. [82] Poesía, p. 249. [83] Ibid., p. 255. [84] Ibid., p. 256. [85] Harris, Study, p. 83. [86] Coleman, op. cit., p. 97. [87] Poesía, p. 263. [88] Paz, op. cit., p. 140. [89] Historial, Prosa, p. 913. [90] The remark is Paz's, op. cit., p. 140. [91] This is the central argument of Otero's splendid article, Taurus, op. cit. [92] Prosa, p. 921. [93] Ibid., p. 922. [94] Ibid., p. 923. [95] Poesía, p. 222.

[96] Coleman, op. cit., p. 91. [97] Paz, op. cit., p. 141. [98] R. Gullón, op. cit., p. 59. [99] Poesías, p. 270. [100] Harris, Study, p. 76. [101] Taléns puts forward the astounding claim, which he makes no attempts to justify, that “La adoración de los Magos” is a poem “donde Eliot es punto de partida, y donde, sin embargo, la reelaboración cernudiana transforma un gran poema en otro gran poema diferente y de mayor complejidad” (op. cit. p. 314). So far from producing a more complex poem, Cernuda has scarcely yet mastered the basic technique of speaking convincingly through his personae. [102] Reprinted in Prosa, pp. 1.137-8. [103] Poesía, p. 235. [104] Silver, op. Cit., pp. 192-3.

Chapter 2 Cernuda and Browning Cernuda, in many ways his own best critic, has left us in Historial de un libro [1] a most enlightening account of his poetic career. It is an account remarkable for the humility and honesty of its tone as well as for the critical precision and justness of many of its observations. We are also fortunate in possessing three accounts of the poet and his circumstances at three different and crucial stages of his development: his youth in Seville[2], his ten year period in Britain[3], and his time in America[4]. These essays allow us not only to form an unusually complete idea of the character and attitudes of the man, but also to follow the evolution of his literary tastes and preferences. It is on the basis of such evidence as these works provide, together with a careful reading of the poems themselves, that one reaches the conclusion that Cernuda, an avid but meticulous reader, came gradually and ineluctably to absorb not only certain stylistic influences, but even a number of the critical opinions, of his English masters, chief among whom were W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot [5]. Though the name of Browning is often linked with these, it seems questionable whether this influence, though it undoubredly did operate on Cernuda, was in every respect enriching and beneficial. The peculiar characteristics of Browning's poetic style are instantly identifiable: a racy, colloquial diction, closely imitating the rhythms of everyday, sometimes even popular speech; an occasional highly personalised compression of the phrasing, designed, in frequent conjunction with interjection, to convey the rapidity of thought in active minds moved, irritated or overcome by the variety of experience; the use of the form of the dramatic monologue, which Browning may virtually be said to have invented, at least in his characteristic adaptation of this form to the lyric poem, etc. To these features of style may be added the constant preoccupation with moral questions, and the innate tendency of the Victorian poet to speak through personae, rather than in his own voice, in an effort to body forth the act of self-awareness, which, as Browning himself phrased it, was less “character in action” than “action in character”. In the preface to “Sordello”, he centred his interest on “incidents in the development of a soul”, adding “little else is worth study”[6]. Cernuda was, of course, interested in these theories and in Browning's notion of the objective poet, but there is a radical difference between Cernuda's feeling that Browning's example was valuable, and his believing Browning's method was valuable for his own practice as a poet. The world of ideas, the realm of facts, and spheres of influence whirl round one another, criss-cross, collide and occasionally interpenetrate, in a relation that recalls the scientists' notion of entropy, which is close to, but not quite, randomness. Cernuda's own word for the influence of the English lyric was often “coincidence”, and this may have as much to do with his conception of the figure of the poet, very different to Browning's, as with his natural reluctance to place himself in what he may have thought of as a position of inferiority, that of

mere epigone. The difference we have referred to can be clearly seen in the different use the two men made of the metaphor of light in defining the poet's rô1e as truthbearer, prophet or teacher of men. In a letter to his wife, the poet Elizabeth Barrett, Browning wrote: I only make men and women speak, give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me[7].

Cernuda, on the other hand, returns again and again to the idea of the divine mission of the poet, e.g. in the last stanza of “A las estatuas de los dioses”: “En tanto el poeta, en la noche otoñal, Bajo el blanco embeleso lunático, Mira las ramas que el verdor abandona Nevarse de luz beatamente, Y sueña con vuestro trono de oro Y vuestra faz cegadora, Lejos de los hombres, Allá en la altura impenetrable.”[8]

The poet is thus conceived as an intermediary between the gods and men, and shares something of the divine attributes, as is made more explicit in the elegy on Lorca, to which we have referred in the preceding chapter: “Leve es la parte de la vida Que como dioses rescatan los poetas.”

The poet is also described as “Aquel que ilumina las palabras opacas Por el oculto fuego originario”.[9]

It would therefore seem that, using Browning's terminology, we ought to regard the Englishman as an exponent of objective poetry, and the Spaniard as a subjective poet, though without denying the subjective poet's right to consider himself what Wordsworth called “a man speaking to men”. For, as Cernuda tells us in Palabras antes de una lectura, his first brief attempt to define his idea of poetry in general and his own in particular, bien puede el poeta en alguna ocasión dirigirse (al público) sin renunciar por ello a esa soledad esencial suya donde cree escuchar las divinas voces[10].

This reminds us that Browning had argued in “Sordello” that the dramatic mode of poetry was in fact inferior to the pure lyric which would be complete self-expression in a perfect world. But, true to his somewhat complacent philosophy that man's lot is to struggle against imperfection knowing that victory, in the nature of things, can never be his, that the reward is in the knowledge of having done one's best and “the prize is in the process”, he plunged cheerfully enough into the task of turning the dramatic monologue into a deft, subtle and increasingly complex instrument for the investigation of human character, human love and human morals. The subjective poet he described thus: He, gifted like the objective poet with the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the one above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth - an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own

soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees –the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand– it is towards these that he struggles[11].

Browning, then, regretfully but firmly turns his back on a style of poetry he felt was inappropriate to his period, incompatible with his convictions, and improper in a fallen world. The Romantic aspirations of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats no longer held the only key to the mystery of poetry. Men and women leading flawed, passionate lives; artists, scholars, adventurers, musicians, lovers -these are the characters who come to haunt his moral imagination and his curiously intricate thought process. Oscar Wilde's famous remarks are still relevant to our understanding of what Browning was about: He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved not what the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise ( ... ) His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist do?[12]

One of the problems that Browning put forth in his famous series of “casuistical monologues” (“Bishop Blougram's Apology”, “Mr Sludge, the Medium”, “Fifine at the Fair”, etc.) is the question of the origin of evil, what he called in “Gold Hair” the Corruption of Man's Heart”. In his edition of Men and Women, J. W. Harper seizes on this as the central preoccupation of Browning's major verse, commenting: The analysis of the process of moral evil he made the essence of his own unique form of poetry, and he was clear in his denunciation of man's ratiocinative intellect as the corrupting organ. His casuistical poems are ingenious analyses of men and women who are essentially good at heart but have gone wrong in the head. For all its variety, its exuberance and its grotesque fun, Browning's Inferno is as populous as Dante's[13].

From what we have been saying about Browning's poetry, it may seem, at first sight, somewhat surprising that Cernuda could have been much struck by it, or could have found in his own practice to date much in common with Browning's. Temperamentally, too, the two poets are poles apart: the bluff, complacent, sentimental Victorian seems the very antithesis of the reticent, uncertaintempered, hypersensitive Andalousian. Yet it is evident from the essay Cernuda wrote on Browning[14] that he read him with pleasure, admiration and understanding. Like many of his essays on English poets, this one sets out to give a sensible and balanced general view of the subject rather than attempt a highly individual or provocatively original analysis. English poetry was not well known in the Spain of the period, and it was precisely in an effort to remedy that situation that Cernuda conceived his collection of critical pieces. The difference in critical approach is at once obvious if one compares these essays on English subjects with, say, his essays on Cervantes or Bécquer, or even Gide and Nerval, i.e. when he felt he could assume a reasonable amount of knowledge on the part of his reader, he comes across as more the poet and critic than the somewhat weary teacher faced with an unusually trying class. Thus, in the short note on Browning he appended to his translation of “A Toccata of Galuppi's”, after briefly outlining Browning's qualities, Cernuda rather waspishly adds: “Todo lo cual no se acuerda con los gustos de nuestro lector actual de poesía.”[15]

Nevertheless, his essay on Browning is measured, careful, respectful and precise, and the

surprising fact remains that he unstintingly praises the qualities of a poetry so utterly unlike his own in conception. Though it is clear that he was struck by some of the aesthetic possibilities offered by the impersonal mode, and it is probable that the discipline involved in such a conception of poetry accorded with his own acute sense of the dignity and responsibility of the poet's calling, one feels that other factors, too, underlie his adoption of Browning as a model, in spite of the obvious dangers of grafting the technique of objective poetry on to the subjective style of expression which came most naturally to him. In the first place, quite extrapoetically, there is the fact that Gide was a confessed admirer of Browning, even going so far as to name him as one of his masters, as Cernuda knew[16]. Cernuda, as several of his commentators have pointed out, had at an early stage made Gide his spiritual mentor, for reasons that had as much to do with the French author's courageous recognition and proclamation of his homosexuality, as with his artistic gifts. In Cernuda's account of his first acquaintance with the writings of André Gide, he makes Pedro Salinas, at that time his Literature teacher at Seville University, the unconscious vehicle of illumination, since it was this reading of Gide that helped Cernuda to reconcile himself to his own paedophilia[17]. Rafael Martínez Nadal, on the other hand, shrewdly suggests that Salinas, “a quien nadie podría acusar de la menor tendencia homosexual”[18], may have been acting as a “preceptor comprensivo” when he recommended that his pupil, whose sexual tendency and consequent problems of conscience he may have devined, should read the work of Gide. Be that as it may, it seems obvious that Gide's wholehearted, though perhaps inaccurate, claim that Browning was a key influence on him could hardly have failed to awaken the curiosity, and most probably the instinctive admiration, of Cernuda for the work and the character of the Victorian poet. An additional factor impelling Cernuda towards the adoption of certain features of Browning's technique is a thematic one. He noticed how Browning's poetry was often a projection of the author's emotional experiences on to “una situación dramática, histórica o legendaria... para que así se objetivara mejor, tanto dramática como políticamente”[19]. Now, as is obvious from Cernuda's poetry from Las nubes onwards, and from his comments in Historial, corroborated by the testimony of Martínez Nadal[20], Cernuda was at this period obsessed by the tragedy of the Civil War, and was torn between love of his country and hatred of the forces which had destroyed it, and which he increasingly felt to be merely the latest agencies of a demon inseparable from the national psyche[21]. A number of instances from the poetry may be quoted in support: “Háblame, madre; Y al llamarte así, digo Que ninguna mujer lo fue de nadie Como tú lo eres mía.”[22] “Ellos, los vencedores Caínes sempiternos, De todo me arrancaron.

Me dejan el destierro.”[23] “Porque mucho he amado tu pasado Resplandor victorioso entre sombra y olvido.”[24] “La historia de mi tierra fue actuada Por enemigos enconados de la vida. El daño no es de ayer ni tampoco de ahora, Sino de siempre. “[25] “Tu sueño y tu recuerdo, ¿quién lo olvida, Tierra nativa, más mía cuanto más lejana?”[26] “El odio y la destrucción perduran siempre Sordamente en la entraña Toda hiel sempiterna del español terrible Que acecha lo cimero Con su piedra en la mano.”[27]

These restless, see-sawing, contradictory responses to Spain and the Spaniards continued throughout Cernuda's life, and his attempts to exorcise the demons that possessed him (and her, and them) provide thematic material for a very considerable number of his poems. Despite his occasional angry denials of any further interest in the country of his birth following the Civil War and exile (e.g. the abrupt “'¿España?' dijo. 'Un nombre./España ha muerto'”[28]), it is clear that the question absorbed him to the point of obsession. It is therefore not difficult to deduce that in turning to Browning, Cernuda was seeking instruction in the technique of dramatic projection, in order to give objectivity and coherence to, as well as greater formal control over, the persistence and difficulty of his theme. Thereafter, Cernuda, who never ceased experimenting with form –though his last collection, Desolación de la quimera, seems, to me at any rate, the work of a tired man, with little of note to say, and little wish to say it– expanded the technique, and used it in other kinds of poems, including historical poems on non-Spanish or only tangentially Spanish subjects, religious poems, and dramatic monologues dealing with characters from the world of art and literature, some contemporaries and others not, in which it is the personality of the subject that interests him. Before we turn to an examination of poems from each of these categories in which the shadow of Browning is apparent, one further peculiarity of Cernuda's reading of Spanish history should be mentioned. He was a Southerner, and at all times felt and acted as a Southerner. He never became accustomed to the climate (all senses) of the north, nor to the manners, habits and attitudes of the inhabitants of the north. The poem he wrote on quitting Britain for good –“La partida”, conceived as he himseli has told us, on board the liner that was taking him to America[29]– is often quoted as an example of the exile's exacerbated feeling of harassment, his inability to adapt to circumstances so different from those of his home; and also exhibits the peculiar and unexpected venom of which this taciturn and exquisitely refined man was at times capable, both in his private and his public life. The poem was included in the collection significantly entitled Vivir sin estar viviendo, and alternates four-line phrases describing the thoughts and impressions of the traveller on board

the ship, and three-line phrases, printed between brackets to underline the alternation of present and past, evoking sights, sounds, impressions experienced during the ten year period of exile in Britain. The tone is moody, morose, disconsolate, until, rousing himself from his depression., the speaker delivers the devastatingly contemptuous parting-shot which we quoted in the previous chapter: (Adiós al fin, tierra como tu gente fría, Donde un error me trajo y otro error me lleva. Gracias por todo y nada. No volveré a pisarte.)

Cernuda's sense of justice, and his recognition of what he realised he had received from his contact with English culture, if nothing else, brought him later to rectify in part the omissions (and commissions) of this valediction, both in an elegant tribute to the British people, included in Historial[30], and in a letter to his friend, the hispanist E. M. Wilson[31]. He also writes hesitantly of his intention in composing “La partida”, and wonders, at greater length than the particular poem seems to warrant, whether he has expressed his conception correctly. Thus, the suggestion is that he was troubled in his conscience about the poem, and, not being prepared to retract it entirely, decided to call it a draw. As for Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, he simply does not have a good word to say, either in prose or in verse. In Historial, he writes: Ni Glasgow ni Escocia me resultaban agradables. A partir de 1941 comencé a pasar en Oxford los meses de vacaciones estivales[32].

In his poems, and in the ill-tempered prose poem “Ciudad caledoniana”[33], dealing with Glasgow, his southern horror at the ugliness, squalor and meanness of the northern industrial city begins to take on tones of moral reprobation. The city is apostrophised in “Gaviotas en los parques”: “Dueña de los talleres, las fábricas, los bares, Toda piedras oscuras bajo un cielo sombrío, Silenciosa a la noche, los domingos devota, Es la ciudad levítica que niega sus pecados.”[34]

The poem goes on to express pity for the seagulls (“penacho de locura”) whose misfortune has driven them from the freedom of their element to the depressing, rainsoaked city park through which flows a “sucio arroyo”. (This grimy river is presumably the Kelvin, which flows through the Botanic Gardens, not far from the University.) The grotesque scenery described in “Cementerio en la ciudad” –the dark, treeless earth, the unremittingly grey house-fronts with washing flapping from the windows, the incongruency of the railway line running behind the cemetery, the dinginess and poverty of the whole– leads Cernuda to describe those buried here as “muertos/Clandestinos”, and to express the horror of life lived in such a place. Death would be preferable, in the inversion of values we have earlier seen to be typical of Las nubes: “Aquí no existe el sueño silencioso De la muerte, que todavía la vida Se agita entre estas tumbas, como una prostituta

Prosigue su negocio bajo la noche inmóvil.”[35]

The poem concludes on a note of ironic consolation, completing the sense of desolation, in an address to the dead: “Sosegaos, dormid: dormid si es que podéis. Acaso Dios también se olvida de vosotros.”

(Speaking, incidentally, as a native of the city, I am almost sure that the cemetery referred to is the Necropolis, behind Glasgow Cathedral, standing in the oldest part of the city, in the district of Townhead, which was a slum by the time Cernuda knew it. The railway line was later discontinued in pursuance of Beeching's policy.) One should not overlook the fact that, whereas one side of Cernuda's reaction is visceral, and, from a certain point of view, inevitable, another side is the outcome of unfortunate generalisation at a particular period of difficulty, hardship and danger. He left his country in despair, and was to retain a bruised and battered image of wartorn Spain. After months of penury and anguish in London and Paris, he settled in what was soon to be a no less war-torn Britain[36], where, as he later recalled, with characteristically generous hindsight, “La guerra y la postguerra impusieron y seguían imponiendo todavía al marcharme de allí, penitencia y ascetismo excepcionales.”[37] In any case, the result was, as we have suggested, the development of a north-south, or more accurately, a south-north dichotomy, with a moralising tendency apparent from the start, and, as we shall see, with the moral balance increasingly and dramatically inclined towards the Latin and Hellenic side[38]. Thus, what began as an unexamined assumption, and deepened into a prejudice, became finally the foundation of an aesthetic position which, though not exempt from a certain capriciousness, a recurrently hyperbolic and complacent tone, is in the end so entangled with his concept of beauty and historic grandeur that it cannot be subtracted from the total effect of his long poems on historic subjects without seriously damaging their unity. Unable to escape the conclusion that Spain had failed historically where countries in northern Europe had succeeded, and unwilling to place all the blame for this state of affairs on the historical r61es of England, France and Holland, he compromised by substituting the term “madrastra” for “madre” in evoking Spain. In “A Larra, con unas violetas”, for example, he writes of “nuestra gran madrastra”[39], and in “Ser de Sansueña”, in lines bearing the imprint of Unamuno in thought and expression, Spain is described as “la madrastra Original de tantos, como tú, dolidos De ella y por ella dolientes.”[40]

Simultaneously and inevitably, Spain emerges as the victim of a crafty, powerful and ignoble continent bent on despoiling her of her birthright. We find Cernuda adumbrating this idea as early as “Lamento y esperanza”. Beginning with the notion of political revolution, which the child dreams of and the adolescent then clearly conceives, the poem first equates the terms “soñábamos” and “pensábamos”, and then contrasts both with actuality, which mercilessly

tears down the edifice of imaginative creation, replacing it with “este soplo de muerte que nos lleva Pisando entre ruinas un fango con rocío de sangre.”[41]

Again, one notes the presence of Unamuno: “El hombre es una nube de la que el sueño es viento. ¿Quién podrá al pensamiento separarlo del sueño?”

But the conclusion, exhibiting the reversion of thought we have noted as typifying the new historical mode, blames the painful situation of Spain not on an inner demon (or “daemon”, as Cernuda, following Goethe, later spells it) nor on mere fatality, as in his Romantic phase (Invocaciones in particular), but on Europe, here for the first time attacked for its avidity, treachery and cunning: “Un continente de mercaderes y de histriones Al acecho de este loco país, está esperando Que vencido se hunda, solo ante su destino, Para arrancar jirones de su esplendor antiguo. Le alienta únicamente su propia gran historia dolorida.”[42]

Here, Cernuda is no doubt thinking of the failure of England (the nation of shopkeepers) and France (the histrions of Europe) to intervene on behalf of the Spanish Republican government during the Civil War. Both, as is well known, alleged the principle of nonintervention in a nation's internal affairs which, in recent international crises, has come to smack so much of cynicism. Out of pain, anguish and rage, the poem extracts a moral lesson with mystic overtones: “Si con dolor el alma se ha templado, es invencible; Pero como el amor, debe el dolor ser mudo”,

fading into the final vision of the “pueblo iluso” of Spain: “Y vedle luego abierto, rosa eterna en los mares.”

Henceforth, this notion of the cunning, avaricious north stalking its southern prey is to haunt Cernuda's sense of history, and is inevitably accompanied by a denunciation not only of the perfidy of the northern nations, but of the rejection of the life instincts which their selfseeking pragmatism implies. The much later poem “Retrato de poeta” (from Con las horas contadas) is another Browningesque poem, in which the speaker sustains a monologue ostensibly addressed to the subject of the portrait (Fray H. F. Paravicino, by EI Greco), but in fact designed to recreate the character of the poet, after the fashion of Browning's “My Last Duchess”. After a long contemplation of the portrait, the speaker is drawn into a series of reflections on the present pathetic state of their common homeland, Spain. (The portrait is also languishing in exile, having been bought, no doubt, by some rich American. The theme of the venality of the powerful must have been much in Cernuda's mind in those days, for in the same collection, the poem “Limbo” dwells on an incident at a cocktail party, when the poet overhears the smug remark of a collector boasting of the acquisition of a rare edition of the work of a poet. The last words of this poem, among the most venomous in Cernuda, are the

famous ones, “Mejor la destrucción, el fuego”, later used as the title of a volume of his own poems by Octavio Paz, to whom “Limbo” is dedicated[43]) In the poem that concerns us here, though the north is not specifically blamed for the speaker's own separation from his country, it is criticised for its shabby utilitarian values, which by implication contrast with those of the Mediterranean: “El norte nos devora, presos en esta tierra, La fortaleza del fastidio atareado, Por donde sólo van sombras de hombres.”[44]

The speaker's own rôle is thus reduced to that of mere passive spectator, haunted by memories which are his only consolation, and make of him “El instrumento dulce y animado, Un eco aquí de las tristezas nuestras.”

Such, then, is the mythic structure, and such the moral imperatives, which underlie Cernuda's series of historical and quasi-historical poems, undertaken, as we have suggested –partly on Cernuda's own authority– under the inspiration of Browning's dramatic monologues. We shall now consider the poems themselves in some detail, but as it seems needlessly laborious and unjustifiably artificial to take them in order, one by one, we shall deal with them rather under the categories mentioned earlier, viz: the poems on historic events or characters; the two religious poems; and lastly, the sub-group mainly on artists. In each case we shall attempt to gauge the nature and extent of Browning's influence, which we have al ready described as rather a question of technique, structure and conception than verbal parallels or style proper, insofar as style can be distinguished from technique. The first category contains three main poems: “El ruiseñor sobre la piedra” (Las nubes), “Silla del rey” (Vivir sin estar viviendo) and “Aguila y rosa” (Con las horas contadas). Though they span three volumes, all three centre on the figure of Philip II of Spain; and at one time, as an afterthought, Cernuda considered bringing them together as a trilogy[45], though it would be a trilogy running precisely back to front, since the earliest poem is a rumination on El Escorial and its significance in the timeless world of art, the second is a monologue uttered by the monarch, projected as surveying his life's work, including the building of El Escorial, whilst the last is a third-person account of the arrival of the young prince Philip in England, his brief, childless marriage to Mary Tudor, and his thankful return to Spain. Whether or not one considers them as a trilogy, what they do possess in common is the theme of grandeur, variously in art, politics and personality: “Y las nubes Coronan tus designios inmortales.”[46]

“El ruiseñor” is, in tone, theme and setting, the most lyrical of the three and therefore the least Browningesque. It is close in its conception to the elegies of Las nubes, developing the theme of the immortality of art as a consolation for the sufferings of life and the ephemeral nature of experience:

“Pero en la vida todo Huye cuando el amor quiere fijarlo. .................................................................................................................................................... sueñas Inmóvil, por la verde foscura de los montes Brillando al sol como un acero limpio, Desnudo y puro como carne efímera, Pero tu entraña es dura, hermana de los dioses.”

The tone here is recognisably Cernuda's own, but it still owes something to Unamuno and Wordsworth (whom Unamuno read with profit); the poem, gathering emotion as it moves along, touches successively on the themes of joy, love, beauty, evanescence, dream (which we know contains for Cernuda the notions of thought and creative imagination) and immortality: “Lo hermoso es lo que pasa Negándose a servir. Lo hermoso, lo que amamos, Tú sabes que es un sueño y que por eso Es más hermoso aún para nosotros. ……………………………………………………………. Y si el tiempo nos lleva, ahogando tanto afán insatisfecho, Es sólo como un sueño; Que ha de vivir in voluntad de piedra, Ha de vivir, y nosotros contigo.”

If this were all, there would be little need for further comment: it would be yet another fine example of the intense, controlled, specific and spiritual emotion which Cernuda had been perfecting throughout Las nubes. But there is more to it: the reappearance of the south-north theme, which makes the “nosotros” of the last line not generic but exclusive, and exclusive not to the Spanish people as a whole, but to the political and spiritual entity of Castile. We are not now in “el sur donde el olivo crece/Junto al mar claro y el cortijo blanco”, but “más arriba”, on “la sierra granítica en que sueñas”. It is this uniquely Castilian emanation in the poem that links it specifically with the other two, rather than the presence, directly or indirectly, of Philip. Unlike Browning, Cernuda offers us a moral centre for judgment, from which we depart at our own risk. This centre is an absolute identification with the destiny of Spain, with the myth and the disaster of Castile, against the ravaging hordes from the north. This theme is introduced gradually, almost, it seems, in passing. The poet is “Entre gentes ajenas Y sobre ajeno suelo Cuyo polvo no es el de mi cuerpo”,

bathing gratefully in the light of memory, the sunbright walls of El Escorial “dentro de mí, tan claros Que con su luz borran la sombra Nórdica donde estoy.”

But one thought collides with another, and a flame is struck, a flame of anger, resentment,

contempt and moral indignation; for the monastery is a hymn, vindicating the southern ideal: “El himno de los hombres Que no supieron cosas útiles Y despreciaron cosas prácticas. ¿Qué es lo útil, lo práctico, Sino la vieja añagaza diabólica De esclavizar al hombre Al infierno en el mundo?”

The tone inevitably soars to utter scorn for a view of life that deliberately deprives itself of beauty, or, worse still, fails to perceive the beauty which is there, being so wrapped up in its pragmatism, its utilitarian precepts and its greed: “Junto a una sola hoja de hierba, ¿Qué vale el horrible mundo práctico Y útil, pesadilla del norte, Vómito de la niebla y el fastidio?”

Here, “vómito”, whilst conserving all its connotative power, was probably suggested by the factory chimneys of the industrial north, “belching smoke”, as we say; and it is a reminder that this poem, too, was written in Glasgow, to whose inhabitants, Cernuda nastily remarks in “Ciudad caledoniana”, “la imaginación les es tan ajena como el agua al desierto, incapaces de toda superfluidad generosa y libre, razón y destino de la misma existencia”[47]. Gloom, despondency and boredom are Philip´s lot, too, on the damp and cheerless island to which the designs of two nations doom him, and where he must marry a plain, elderly woman. The moral dichotomy represented by North and South has, in this case, historical warrant: Mary's parentage is exploited for symbolic effect, and though neither Henry VIII nor Catherine of Aragón is named, nor the religious schism directly alluded to, it is clear which bloodline and which version of Christianity the speaker identifies with: “Si a la herencia paterna, densa de infamia y crimen La materna rescata, limpia en el sufrimiento silencioso Tras los años de escarnio, su Dios quizá le debe Un pedazo de dicha, algo que alivie el dejo amargo De la vida, aunque sea ahora, cuando la mocedad se ha ido.”[48]

Moreover, the intellectual superiority of the Spanish prince over his English subjects is dwelt on, as well as the power of his will and his sense of duty, both civic and religious. He is presented as a philosopher, a poet-substitute, and it would seem as though Cernuda had lent him certain of his own characteristics, such as his reserve, his contemplative nature, his love of solitude, his distaste for crowds and fuss, together with his gentlemanlike acquiescence in abhorred but necessary social rituals: “Pendones y estandartes le saludan, y el mozo, a quien dotara Tan bien naturaleza en apariencia y pensamiento, Un poco en su reserva cede y en su distancia otro, Para hallar el latido de aquellas criaturas, Aunque todo parece, allá en su mente, remoto, inabordable.” ………………………………………………………………. Ama Felipe la calma, la quietud contemplativa; Si un mundo bello hay fuera, otro más bello hay dentro.

Quiere vivir en ambos, pero estos seres sólo Viven afuera y el ocio fértil de la mente les aburre. Por eso él debe ahora hacer jornada activa, y practicar deportes.

Though these quotations from “Águila y rosa. may seem inordinately long, they serve a double purpose. In the first place, they illustrate both the commentary we are attempting and the cut of the verse; in the second, they exhibit certain new features of Cernuda's diction which it may prove rewarding to analyse. The poem consists of twenty stanzas of five lines each, generally phrased as one single, or two long sentences. The lines belong to no classifiable metrical pattern, but the initial awkwardness or prosiness is lessened when one realises that there is –tentative and approximate though it remains– a tendency to break each line into two hemistichs, each with three strong beats. This is the case, for example, in lines 31, 33 and 35 quoted earlier, and lines 21, 23, 519 52, 53 and 54 just quoted. However, in order to feel this rhythm, which is fairly variable. one has to force, or entirely suppress, the naturally syllabic beat of Spanish speech no less than Spanish poetry, until it adopts a word stress analogous to the natural rhythm of English speech. In addition, one cannot help hearing the unusual amount of alliteration that creeps into these poems of Cernuda's. This can be seen, for example, in lines 32, 33 and 34, and again in line 51. But it proliferates in the poem we have not yet touched on, “Silla del rey”. Here is the opening stanza: “Aquí sentado miro cómo crece La obra dulce y dura, vasta y una, Protegiendo, tras el muro de piedra, La fe, mi diamante de un más claro día, Tierra hecha luz, la luz en nuestros hechos.”[49]

The device continues in phrases such as, “la tierra díscola y diversa”

and reaches absurd dimensions in lines like these: “Fuerza febril, felina y femenina” (1.9) “El furor de la fiera a quien cadenas forjo” (1.13) “Todo traza mi trama ... “ (1.21) “A mi canon católico por campos” (1.27), etc.

Both features, the exaggerated use of alliteration, and the coarsening of the phrasing, are highly unusual in Cernuda's poetry, and almost certainly represent attempts to incorporate into his versification features of Browning's line. Browning is famous –some would say infamous– in English poetry for the harshness and jaggedness of his diction, and the unevenness of his rhythms, and he frequently resorts to alliteration, especially when using the shorter line. But it is generally true that Browning imitates, rather than distorts, the rhythms of natural speech, and the rhythm breaks down at a moment of crisis in the speaker's emotional, moral or intellectual experience, i.e. under the stress of thought or feeling, e.g.: “That's mistake,, they cry, “Thunderbolts fly for neither fright nor sport, But do appreciable good, like tides,

Changes of the wind, and other natural facts “Good” meaning good to man, his body or soul, Mediate, immediate, all things minister To man, –that's settled: be our future text 'We are His children!'“ So, they now harangue About the intention, the contrivance, all That keeps up an incessant play of love, See the Bridgewater book[50].

In this passage, the excited, nervous rhythm indicates the state of mind of the speaker, terrified that his frauds will be exposed, and the sudden darts in and out of quos tation admirably convey the impression of a sharp-witted villain imitating the pundits in a theatrical attempt to shift the grounds of the argument, and to remove attention from himself. As for Browning's frequent alliterations, notable here, though they are occasionally gratuitous, they can often be defended as highlighting key terms in the argument, or as binding together central parts of an often disjointed discourse[51]. Edwin Muir finds that Browning's poems “have a tentative and casual music in which the thought seems to be experimentally finding its proper expression: almost a hand-to-mouth music.”[52]

But what is one to make of Cernuda's use of these devices? Clearly, each reader is free to react as he chooses, and it would be impertinent for a non-Spaniard to dictate the terms on which Cernuda is to be heard. Still, more than the ear is involved here, for, in the poems we have been examining, the predominant tone is one of brooding melancholy, and the rhythms are slow, ponderous, even sluggish. There is no drama in Cernuda, and the character of Philip never comes alive. We are being told what Cernuda wants us to believe about the monarch, rather than being shown what Cernuda thought he was like[53]. The problem becomes more acute when the rhythm is abandoned, for the slackness of colloquial diction -that colloquial ideal which so delighted Cernuda in English poetry- makes some passages indistinguishable from prose. Such a line as “por eso él debe ahora hacer jornada activa y practicar deportes”

would seem astonishingly slipshod in the normally careful Cernuda if we did not know what he was aiming at. As it is, one finds the line hardly satisfactory, and a similar flatness pervades the whole of the thirteenth stanza: “Aunque vencido su disgusto es afable o lo parece, Y dice blandamente, cuando uno temeroso se le acerca, 'Sosegaos', No se lo perdonaron, no le perdonan nunca Este miedo que en su presencia les doblaba. Aún por eso le odian, odiando ahí aquella imagen de sí mismos.”

Again we notice the failure to illuminate the character from within, and, what is worse, a bleating, puerile tone creeps into Cernuda's voice at this stage. For it is Cernuda's voice that we hear in these poems, the character of Philip becoming a peg for the poet to hang his hat on. We are being preached at, never a comfortable situation, and one made still more uncomfortable by the ill-concealed bigotry of the preacher.

T. S. Eliot, whose critical brilliance is occasionally marred by the perverse cleverness of his observations[54], has made an interesting point about Browning's use of the persona, though it is perhaps less telling than it appears at first sight: In The Tempest, it is Caliban who speaks; in “Caliban upon Setebos”, it is Browning's voice that we hear, Browning taking aloud through Caliban (...) When we listen to a play by Shakespeare, we listen not to Shakespeare, but to his characters; when we read a dramatic monologue by Browning, we cannot suppose that we are listening to any other voice than that of Browning himself[55].

Now if what Eliot means here is that Browning is Shakespeare's inferior in the creation of character, nobody is going to argue, though it should be added that Oscar Wilde held that Browning, in boldness of intention and design in such creation, came very close to Shakespeare, adding mischievously, but perceptively, that “had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him.”[56] And after all, Eliot's remarks could be taken as a species of oblique compliment, since they imply that nobody else writes like Browning, and this at least has the merit of originality. But taking the words more squarely at their face value, the argument is that Browning's characters all sound alike when they are talking –not “speaking” we notice: that is reserved for Shakespeare's characters. Well, there is something in that: Bishop Blougram, Mr Sludge and even Fra Lippo use the same sort of words and the same sort of phrasing, and they share a common wiliness, a common circuitousness. There is, too, a sense in which the characters of The Ring and the Bock are distinguished less by their tricks of speech than by the import of what the say, i.e. their version of events. But Browning, after all, was writing dramatic lyrics and not poetic drama, which surely makes all the difference. His personae are so many masks for so many points of view, in the end converging on the three or four questions that Browning thought most important: the nature of love, the nature of good and evil, the nature of God, and the inevitable, disruptive presence of death. Though he had no talent for writing plays, as he displayed again and again, he could make a character come alive. The problem in Cernuda's case is different. Bluntly, it would seem as if he were temperamentally unsuited to the creation of character. We miss in his personae those flashes, so typical of Browning, of insight, psychological penetration or humour, and the thrill consequent on the sudden illuminating revelation of sheer villainy or sheer decency. In a word, it is variety that one misses in Cernuda's creations: one reads these poems with the feeling that he was wasting a talent that lay in another direction, in the direction of lyric meditation, where his mystical and metaphysical bent could be seen to advantage. The soliloquy of Philip in “Silla del rey” contains the revealing line, which might stand as an epitaph for the whole enterprise: “Maté a la variedad, y esa es mi gloria.”[57]

Once again, one is repelled by the grimness of the character'. indeed, it is difficult to decide whether Philip II or the protagonist of “El César” is more repugnant. But, unlike Shakespeare's Macbeth or Iago, these characters are clearly endowed with certain features of

their creator's personality, and the complicity is disconcerting, since it is difficult to see where it ends. This is a way of saying that they are not objectified, in the sense Cernuda rightly understood Browning to use the term. Here is Philip: “Sé que estas vidas, por quienes yo respondo, En poco servirían de no seguir unidas Frente a una gran tarea, grande aunque absurda; Su voluntad a solas no asintiendo Con voluntad contigua. Mi cetro es su cayado. ………………………………………………………………. Mi obra no está afuera, sino adentro, En el alma, y el alma, en los azares Del bien y el mal, es igual a sí misma: Ni nace ni perece. ………………………………………………………………. No puedo equivocarme, no debo equivocarme; Y aunque me equivocase, haría El que mi error se tornara Verdad ...”[58]

And this is El César (Tiberius): “Conmigo estoy, yo el César, dueño Mío, y en mí del mundo. Mi dominio De lo visible abarca a lo invisible, Cerniendo como un dios, pues que divino soy Para el temor y el odio de humanas criaturas. La víctima provoca al verdugo inocente, Y la sangre no acusa, la sangre es beneficio Mayor, necesaria igual que el agua es a la tierra.”[59]

One need not attribute the closing thoughts of Tiberius Caesar to Cernuda, though his prevarications and casuistry are close enough to Philip's to make the personal overtones disturbing. As for the language, though it has its bursts of energy and lyric force, it is more persistently prosaic: the unrelenting solemnity of tone and the rhetorical flourishes yield to pomposity, when the aim is grandeur, and the thought is shackled by prejudice, though the intention is objectivity. Caesar's line “¿Amigos, dije? Amante o familiar, extraños todos”

has a typically Cernudian ring to it, and the proud solitude, the aloofness, is something all readers of Cernuda are accustomed to. It is the same disdainful tone that pervades “Quetzalcóatl”, the protagonist this time not poet, king or emperor, but a warrior, one of the Conquistadores, who typically recalls how “el cielo De la tarde en Castilla ... ……………………………………….…………………… Me enseñó la lección digna del alma Cuando lo contemplaba yo de niño Sobre las bardas últimas al páramo.”[60]

He too remembers how in exile he yearned for Spain, significantly styled “madrastra, que no madre”. Again, the cruelty is defiantly expressed:

“Astucia, fuerza, crueldad y crimen, Todo lo cometimos. ……………………………………… ……………………………………….…………………… Cuerpos acometí, arrancando sus almas Apenas fatigadas de la vida. ……………………………………….…………………… Destinos corté en flor, por la corola Aún intacto el color, puro el perfume.”

There is sarcasm as well as bitterness in the lines in which he anticipates objections to such conduct (a sarcasm that may well contain a veiled reference to the behaviour of the French and British governments during the Spanish Civil War, which we mentioned earlier): “Ya sé lo que decís: el horror de la guerra, Mas lo decís en paz, y en guerra calláis con mansedumbre”

Cernuda's very particular and rabid form of patriotism contrasts oddly with his severe strictures on Yeats's much more pacific brand of Irish nationalism, as we shall see later. In the meantime, to close these remarks on his history cycle, it is interesting to compare the view of Spain which emerges from these poems with the text of a BBC Radio broadcast delivered by Cernuda in London, in 1943[61], on the occasion of the thousandth anniversary of Castile. He begins by pointing out the difficulty of coming at a just perception and understanding of other minds, countries and cultures –which, incidentally, he might have done well to remember when making some of his own devastating generalisations– and, speaking from his own difficult experience of exile, adds: Desde fuera, y a distancia es cómo se aprende a ver y aceptar el destino nacional, y el nuestro individual a aquél ligado, constituyendo algo superior a nosotros mismos, a nuestra dicha o desdicha transitorias.[62]

But it is the central argument that is most arresting, for it is almost a prose gloss on his own Philip II cycle, especially “El ruiseñor sobre la piedra”, written about the same time. Cernuda's words deserve to be quoted extensively for the light they throw on the poems we have been discussing. Describing the Castilian mystic tradition as “la más noble expresión de nuestra tierra y espíritu”, he goes on: Mucho se ha escrito ya, quizá demasiado, en torno a lo que representa la mole de El Escorial, pero nunca se dijo, que yo sepa, cómo allí está expresado en piedra, y con majestad sin par, un esquema político equivalente al esquema metafísico que sistematizan los escritores místicos, que así como hay una metafísica castellana y una poética, brotadas del pensamiento mítico nacional, hay también una política en todo conforme a éste. ¿Qué es, en efecto, nuestro destino histórico, desde sus orígenes hasta hoy, sino el de un pueblo movido por imperativos de conciencia, y no por razones de seguridad y conveniencia colectiva? Castilla, colocada ante la alternativa de traicionar su fe de encarnar una realidad mítica y el incentivo de unos intereses temporales, siempre prefirió mantenerse fiel a aquélla, aun a riesgo del fracaso y la derrota.[63]

Such, then, is the myth underlying Cernuda's poetic celebrations of Philip II and his life's work. One wonders which is more striking: the naiveté of the vision, so uncomfortably close in certain phrases to the later propaganda and crusading zeal of the victors in the war, his enemies; or the prejudice which, allowing him to detect the ills and shortcomings of the northern cultures, blinds him to those of his beloved south, and leads him, in his recreation of historical characters, into a curious defence of cruelty, speciousness, sophistry and self-

indulgence. Browning's special pleading tends naturally to make the character out to be better than he seems, whilst Cernuda's –no less the barrister's for all its mysticism, and, to use the current term, mystification– unfortunately tends to make the character out to be worse than he probably was. It is, of course, true that Cernuda was under no species of obligation to renounce his particular view of his country's past simply because he had renounced, on a question of principle, his right to go on living in it; nor was he obliged to renounce his right to criticise the ethos of the countries that had offered him asylum. This would be a misguided, even potentially a destructive, notion of what is owing to gratitude. Indeed, one might go further, and suppose –as Cernuda may have supposed– that the sacrifice he had made, and the lessons he had learned from making it, gave him a peculiar right to expose the defects of his host nations, as well as a peculiar insight into the nature of those defects. This much is deducible, or at least extrapolable, from certain remarks in his BBC broadcast[64]. In addition, the obsessive probing into the reasons for Spain's loss of hegemony in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the criticisms levelled at other European nations for their conduct during that period, are perfectly respectable in themselves. Philip's policy was remarkably clear-sighted and tenacious, and it came very close to success, a success which would have changed the course of European history, and completely altered Spain's subsequent rôle as the poor man of the continent. These arguments, as far as they go, are cogent. But cogency is one thing, and belligerance is quite another. It is the venom of Cernuda's historical poems, and, if the expression may be allowed, their cussedness, which make them so distasteful. The exception, as we have seen, is “El ruiseñor”, which is also exceptional in being purely lyrical in its conception. The others, the Browningesque poems, fail because they are not objectified, because they are a transportation of Cernuda, warts and all, into the sixteenth century, rather than an imaginative projection of Philip into the twentieth. Or, if one prefers, they are the outcome of the superimposition of the personality of the poet on to a sort of historical dummy rather than the vivification of a persona through the medium of art. “It is Browning's voice we hear”, complained Eliot; and in our case, with perhaps greater reason, we may paraphrase, “It is Cernuda's anguish we feel.” Eliot's famous dictum, which Cernuda became fond of quoting, is relevant here: Cernuda, in these poems, failed to maintain the necessary distance between “the man who suffers and the mind that creates.” What in Browning is athletic, dramatic and openminded is too often in the brooding temperament of Cernuda, flabby, static and shallow. Turning to the second group of Browning-influenced poems, the religious compositions, one notices a similar technical awkwardness, though the personal intrusions are less marked, possibly because of Cernuda's fundamental agnosticism, which clearly tended to work against an avowedly militant stance. The religious theme is important in Cernuda, but his treatment of religious questions in the poetry is full of vacillations and volte-faces, which, as we have seen, are a fair reflection of his actual experience. His cautious and scrupulously

honest evaluation of his personal religious experience is borne out by the ambiguous attitude towards faith which we meet in the poetry. Though without Unamuno's passionate need to believe, Cernuda clearly found it extremely difficult to square his metaphysics of love, beauty and the desire for immortality with the idea of a godless universe. At the same time, genuine religious faith he found to be at odds with his intellectual or rational convictions, and he found the Hellenic myths much more satisfying emotionally and aesthetically, as well as spiritually, than the tenets of Christianity, which he deemed bleak and sterile[65]. Given this ambivalence of attitude, it may be assumed that Cernuda consciously chose the subjects of the resurrection of Lazarus and the journey of the Magi precisely because of their dramatic potential. Both sets of circumstances represent thresholds of religious experience: in the first case, Lazarus' knowledge is of that privileged sort that partakes of experience of both this world and the next, whilst in the case of the Magi, we have a spiritual journey, of great symbolic significance, involving the unbeliever's search for faith. A third poem, “Resaca en Sansueña”, written around the same time[66], may also be discussed here. Though the theme is not religious, but rather mythical or legendary, we have already seen that myth” and “religion” were virtually synonymous terms to Cernuda, and that he associated legendary projections in poetry with Browning's technique. The fact that his poem is incomplete (its subtitle is “Fragmentos de un poema dramático” is, therefore, irrelevant, since what interests us at this stage is Cernuda's conception of poetry, and his attempts to adapt his style and technique to Browning's model. A detailed analysis of the poems in this group has already been attempted in the previous chapter, so that what interests us now is to see them in perspective. The tendency to overwrite, and thus sacrifice the very dramatic effect he is striving after, which we have noticed in these poems, may be the result of Cernuda's taking over Browning's conversational style along with his techniques. But the loquacity verging on glibness appropriate to Mr Sludge, Bishop Blougram or Fra Lippo Lippi are not to be thought of as the loquacity or glibness of Browning himself. He shows in his shorter pieces that he can be concise when it suits his purpose. Hence, when Cernuda, in his essay on Browning, declares his preference for these shorter pieces, he reveals an imperfect sympathy with the intentions of his model. Browning makes his characters talk in order to reveal their inner selves; Cernuda's kings seem to reveal their inner selves in an effort to stimulate conversation; and Lazarus strives to put his thoughts into words rather than reveal his thoughts through his words. Browning's characters explain themselves; Cernuda's explain themselves away. The result is that, with the exception of Lazarus (though with the reservation mentioned) Cernuda's characters are wooden, so wooden, in fact, that they are more like puppets than personae. Nevertheless, the idea of objective poetry, in Browning's sense, was one which Cernuda never wholly abandoned, despite his own suspicion that it was a style, or rather a technique, that he had never wholly conquered. He is referring to the objectified image, as well as to plainness of diction and natural rhythm, when he remarks with unusual candour in Historial on his recent (1958) re-reading of his own poetry, and the negative effect it has produced on

him: La relectura de mis versos, hecha recientemente, al corregir pruebas para la edición tercera de La realidad y el deseo, constituyó un ejercicio ascético, mortificante de la vanidad, ya que pocas composiciones parecían concertarse y aun en éstas el concertarniento sólo era fragmentario, con las predilecciones estilísticas y preferencias expresivas que acabo de indicar [67].

It is unfortunately extremely difficult to contradict this negative evaluation, insofar as it affects his continual pursuit of an acceptable Spanish form of the dramatic lyric which so charmed him in Browning. In the main, all of Cernuda's remaining attempts in the Browning manner concentrate on fellow artists (“Góngora”, “Retrato de poeta”, “El poeta y la bestia” “Birds in the Night”, “Ninfa y pastor por Ticiano”, “In Memoriam A(ndre) G(ide)”, etc.) though there are two poems that stand out above these as examples of what he could do in the field when more than what one may term his professional instinct was awakened. These are “Apologia pro vita sua” and “Un contemporáneo”. It would be tedious, as well as ungenerous, to go through these compositions minutely for evidence of a Browningesque element which is present, in many cases, only in intention. In “Góngora”, for example, we have an early instance of how Cernuda could be seduced from poetry into the most earnest prose by the pitch of his feelings on the subject. It is puzzling to see this poem so often singled out for favourable comment. In a style that ominously anticipates the worst excesses of Desolación de la quimera, he drifts from the priggish, name-dropping opening, full of the quotation-mongering of the literary journalist, to the embarrassingly direct attack, however deserved, of the middle section: “Decretado es al fin que Góngora jamás fuera poeta, Que amó lo oscuro y vanidad tan sólo le dictó sus versos. Menéndez y Pelayo, el montañés henchido por sus dogmas, No gustó de él y le condena con fallo inapelable.”[68]

It is impossible to prove in a study of this scope and length, but it may be suggested, for what it is worth, that this arrogant, flighty and hectoring style, latent from certain compositions of Las nubes onwards, finally took over in Cernuda's last volume, and that Browning, all unknowing, was to blame. Browning, after all, showed Cernuda what historical projection could give the poet, and Cernuda chose to examine only one image of his country's history, which he then repeated ad nauseam. The famous “Díptico español”, from Desolación, is already present in “Ser de Sansueña”, from Vivir sin estar viviendo, though there are some fifteen years between the poems, and “Ser de Sansueña” could have been written ten years before it was: “La nobleza plebeya, el populacho noble, La pueblan; dando terratenientes y toreros, Curas y caballistas, vagos y visionarios, Guapos y guerrilleros. Tú compatriota, Bien que te repugne, de su fauna.”[69]

Once again, then the poem returns to the difference between the past glories of Spain and her present misfortunes: “Si en otro tiempo hubiera sido nuestra,

Cuando gentes extrañas la temían y odiaban, Y mucho era ser de ella; cuando toda Su sinrazón congénita, ya locura hoy, Como admirable paradoja se imponía. Vivieron muerte, sí, pero con gloria Monstruosa. Hoy la vida morimos En ajena rincón.”

These sentiments are difficult to share not, as we have said, because they are incompatible with genuine patriotism, but because the are dictated by a narrowness and a sentimentality incompatible with the original point of view. Neitherjealousy nor spite had a place there, though very little else seems to have survivied. Though Hölderlin is a possible source here –especially the great Odes and the prose work Hyperion– there is a truculence of tone in Cernuda that contrasts sharply with the soaring generosity of the German poet's evocations of the grandeur that was Greece. And it goes without saying that Cernuda's tight-lipped haughtiness, his refusal to enter into argument or to allow the least questioning of the superiority of his position, could scarcely be further removed from the bonhomie, the zest and the sheer mental agility of Browning. Cernuda, to be sure, almost always avoided Browning's besetting fault of garrulity –poems like “Góngora” or “Birds in the Night” are the exception– but it may be fairly asked whether, in circumnavigating the reefs on which Browning's enterprise was always likely to come to grief, Cernuda did not, in the end, court disaster of another sort: the perfil of rhetoric. In following Browning, Cernuda, the postRomantic and incipient Modernist, almost certainly mistook his man. Pound's frustration –“Damn you, Robert Browning!”– had no other cause, and suggests both the power of this temptation and Cernuda's extraordinary instinct for detecting an innovatory poetic, even if its rewards are not immediately apparent. We must not, therefore, close this chapter without a word on one composition in which Cernuda shows his grasp of the essential features of Browning's technique. In “Un contemporáneo”, echoing in title and content Browning's “How It Strikes a Contemporary” from Men and Women, Cernuda at last manages to achieve that degree of objectivity which allows him to consider the effects of his character, tastes and personality on others without the reader's necessarily being aware that the subject of the poem is the poet himself. In “Un contemporáneo”, we are not required to identify with a particular set of values in order to judge aright of the character of the speaker or that of his subject. Indeed, Cernuda's own well known pessimistic predictions as to the likely fate of his work –that it would remain unknown, or be ignored, rejected or vilified by all but a judicious few– are so cunningly woven into the fabric of the poem as to be indistinguishable to the unenlightened from the cynicism and want of perspicacity of the elderly speaker: “Sabemos que un poeta es otra cosa; La chispa que le anima pronto prende En quienes junto a él cruzan la vida, Sus versos aceptados tal moneda corriente.”[70]

Cernuda thus manages to get the best of both worlds, after the fashion of Browning, by

attributing sentiments of his own to a speaker who, though morally discredited, is not without a certain intelligence and a mordant sense of humour: “La sociedad es justa, a todos trata Como merecen; si hay exceso Primero, con idéntico exceso retrocede, Recobrando nivel............................................................................. ................................................................................................................. “Mas eso no se aplica a nuestro hombre. ¿Acaso hubo exceso en el olvido Que vivió día a día? Hecho a medida Del propio ser oscuro, exacto era; y a la muerte Se lleva aquello que tornamos De la vida, o lo que ella nos da: olvido Acá, y olvido allá para él. Es lo mismo.”[71]

Much of the liveliness and the persuasiveness of this self-portrait is owing to a technique which Cernuda learnt from Browning and which Browning introduced into lyric poetry with the same sureness of touch which Henry James displayed in his use of it in the novel: the technique of the point of view, the rejection of material which could not be considered psycologically appropriate, and the suppression of information which a speaker could not plausibly have come by in normal circumstances. There is something of the detective story in the way we piece together everyday information about the characters of our contemporaries in order to arrive at an estimate of their worth, and Browning's realisation of this seemingly trivial circumstance of our mental processes lies behind some of his most subtle effects. For, as Cernuda understood to such good effect in this poem, this involves a considerable degree of collaboration on the part of the reader, who has to see past the speaker's intellectual and moral inadequacies, and grasp the peculiar bent –one might even say warp– of his mind, in order to get at the deeper-lying implications of his judgement, and perhaps infer, as in this case, the true character of the ostensible subject. With apparently disarming frankness, very much in the Browning mold, the speaker of “Un contemporáneo” confesses his ignorance; his confession is genuine, as far as it goes, thus eliciting our sympathy for him: “Lo que pensó, amó, odió, le dejó indiferente, Ignoro; como lo ignoro igual hasta de otros Que conocí mejor. Nuestro vivir, de muchedumbre A solas con un dios, un demonio o una nada, Supongo que era el suyo también. ¿Por qué no habría de [serlo?”

It is only when we set this beside the indifferent dismissal of the poet's work as probably worthless, and the equally unmotivated assumption that the great poet is always instinctively recognisable, that we notice the hollowness of the argument and the prejudice that is posing as common sense. The structure of the poem is thus ironic, and, though Gil de Biednia's remark, which we alluded to above, that Cernuda was incapable of irony is, on the whole, sound –disdain and sarcasm, we have seen, are his more usual weapons– it is much too sweeeping to be left unqualified.

There are, of course, other poems of Cernuda's on which the imprint of Browning is more or less clearly visible. “Apologia pro vita sua”, for example, can be read as a happy blend of a Browningesque situation with Cernuda's personal style and characteristic themes. But perhaps enough has been said to suggest the general drift of Browning's influence on Cernuda. Despite the widely differing characters of the two men, and their virtually opposing attitudes to life, Cernuda was attracted by the obliqueness of the Victorian's technique, with its objectifying effect, and by the plainness of his diction, which is not to be thought of as simplicity but rather as a naturalness or authenticity of utterance. It may be thought that Cernuda was temperamentally unsuited to the dramatic monologue, and that his proud, brittle, moody and occasionally vitriolic personality could not easily enter into a poetic vein which requires flexibility as well as penetration, and an amused, even slightly cynical tolerance of human foibles in addition to an enthusiastic interest in the variety and the spectacle of human life. Cernuda's fidelity to his ideal of scrupulous, even rigid, honesty, his steadfast commitment to a rather narrow set of absolute values, his belief in what he thought of a “insobornabilidad”, and the ferocity with which he defended these values and scorned those whom he imagined to be their enemies, together with his peculiar facility for conceiving and defending prejudices, all tended to hamper his efforts to use Browning's techniques for his very different ends. Though both poets were born moralists, Cernuda has a tendency to preach when Browning persuades, to taunt where Browning temporises. Cernuda, then, was very seriously cramped by Browning's style, but this is not to say that his efforts were wasted. Wilde's famous remark that “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning” contains what is still the most serious charge againt Browning's style, and though we have dwelt on the prosaic nature of some of Cernuda's Browning-influenced poetry, it is precisely because of the contrast between this and Cernuda's other style, or styles, that is stands out so clearly. For Browning had only a limited influence on Cernuda, both in the intensity and the duration of his dominance, and this influence, though it reappears intermittently in a modified form, until the end of Cernuda's life, is transitional between the Becquerian and Hö1derlinesque period, which Ricardo Gullón was unwise enough to predict as definitive[72], and his full maturity in the collections following Las nubes, i.e. Como quien espera el alba, Vivir sin estar viviendo and Con las horas contadas, culminating in the unique series of love poems entitled Poemas para un cuerpo. Having discovered in Browning the value of unemphatic discourse –“escribir como se habla”, as Jiménez put it– and the theory, at least, of objectivity in art, Cernuda was now to undergo the crucial experience of reading Yeats and Eliot with a more exact awareness of what they were attempting. These “coincidences” were to leave a lasting mark on Cernuda's poetry, as we shall be attempting to demonstrate in the next two chapters.

[1] Poesía y Literatura II, in Prosa Completa, pp. 898-939.

[2] José María Capote Benot, El período sevillano de Luis Cernuda, Gredos, Madrid, 1971. [3] R. Martínez Nadal, Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda, Hiperión, Madrid, 1983 [4] C. P. Otero, in a variety of essays, including studies of aspects of the poetry and valuable comment and information as a friend of the poet. Letras I, Barral, 1972 [5] To save space and avoid needless repetition, the word “English” is used throughout to identify the language rather than the nationality of the author in question [6] See the preface to Sordello in Browning, Poetical Works, (ed. Ian Jack), Oxford Un Pr, 1970. [7] Quoted in Dramatic Personae, ed. F, B, Pinion, Collins, London, 1969, p. 243. [8] Cernuda, Poesías completas, p. 202. [9] Ibid. p. 208. [10] Prosa, p. 871. it is interesting that in the first version of this talk, reprinted in Prosa, pp. 1.496-1.500, Cernuda describes the moment of poetic inspiration as “la misma escondida razón natural que tienen las hojas para renovar su mágica vida cada primavera.o This is almost certainly a reminiscence of Keats's famous remark that unless poetry come as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. [11] Browning, An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Works, OUP, 1954, p 647 [12] Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, in Selected Prose, Dent, London, 1948, p. 253. [13] Men & Women, ed. J. W. Harper, Dent and Sons, London, 1975. Intro, p. xviii. [14] Robert Browning, in Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa, Prosa, pp. 640-659. [15] Prosa, p. 803. [16] Ibid., p. 642. [17] Historial, Prosa, p. 905. [18] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 227. [19] Historial, p. 923 [20] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 142, ff. [21] One may note in passing that this love/hate relationship with the mother country is far from being a peculiarity of Cernuda's, though it is true that in his case it was experienced with peculiar intensity. Larra's whole position depended on this ambiguous reaction, and, out of a host of other names, we might select those of Juan Goytisolo and the philosopher Fernando Savater as contemporary exponents of this obsession. Indeed, it is scarcely impertinent to suggest that a similar vision of the “cuestión patria” is held by a wide variety of Spaniards, of widely differing ideologies, right across the social scale. [22] Poesía, p. 212. [23] Ibid., p. 269. [24] Ibid., p. 214. [25] Ibid., p. 477. [26] Ibid., p. 289. [27] Ibid., p. 208. [28] Ibid., p. 251. [29] Historial, p. 930. [30] “No es Inglaterra, ni son los ingleses, gente que atraiga fácilmente el afecto, al menos mío; pero no conozco tierra ni gente hacia las que sienta igual admiración y respeto.” Prosa, p. 926. [31] No piense que me olvido de Inglaterra, porque como es natural la recuerdo mucho ahora, y comprendo cuánto la debo espiritualmente. Quizá mi estancia allá, de cerca de diez años, ha sido la fase más rica de mi vida hasta abora, si no como molde primero, como refinación de lo que a ella llevé conmigo.” Letter of March 17, 1948, reproduced in Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 184. [32] Prosa, p. 924 [33] Ocnos, Prosa, p. 76. [34] Poesía, p. 268. [35] Ibid., p. 252.

[36] See Martínez Nadal, op. cit., for an interesting account of Cernuda's movements, and desperation, between his first arrival in London, in the spring of 1938, and his taking up a post in a Surrey school in September of the same year. [37] Historial, p. 931. [38] Jonson's famous remark that Shakespeare knew sinall Latin and less Greek. could be applied with even greater show of truth to Cernuda –one infallible sign of the Spanish poet's modernity. Cernuda, who knew of Browning's enviable classical proficiency, did not allow his own comparative ignorance of Latin, and his total want of Greek scholarship, to stand in the way of his strictures on Spanish literature, which he deems to be sadly wanting, more than any European nation, in the saving grace of the Hellenic spirit. (See Ocnos, 'Helena', Prosa, pp. 97-8.) [39] Poesía, p. 220. [40] Ibid., p. 386. [41] Ibid., p. 233. [42] Ibid., p. 254 [43] Ibid., p. 432. [44] Ibid., p. 422. [45] When “Aguila y rosa” was reprinted in “Papeles de Son Armadans”, Palma de Mallorea, XIX (octubre de 1957). See the note to this poem in Poesía, p. 915. [46] Poesía, p. 272. [47] Ocnos, Prosa, p. 76. [48] Poesía, p. 410. [49] Ibid., p. 388. [50] “Mr Sludge, the Medium”, in Dramatis Personae, 11. 1. 130-40. [51] The reader is referred to “Rabbi Ben Ezra” for numerous examples of this. [52] Edwin Muir, Essays on Literature and Society. Quoted Pinion, p. 249. [53] Wayne C. Booth makes use of the difference established by Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction) in his own The Rhetoric of Fiction, between “telling. and showing”. Though both studies are concerned with the novelist's strategies, there is no reason why these useful terms cannot be applied to the art of dramatic –or indeed, any other kind– of poetry. [54] See the remarks of Octavio Paz, “La palabra edificante”, Taurus, p. 145, on Eliot's occasional capriciousness. [55] T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry”, in On Poetry and Poets, Faber, London, 1972, p. 86. [56] Oscar Wilde, op. cit., p. 255. [57] Poesía, p. 389. [58] Ibid., pp. 389-91. [59] Ibid., pp. 402-6. [60] Poesía, p. 313. [61] Monday night, December 13, 1943; Spanish Programe; 21.00-21,15 G.M.T. “El milenario de Castilla. V. Por Luis Cernuda. Published as an appendix in R. Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 319-23. [62] Ibid., p. 320. [63] Ibid., p. 322. [64] See also Historial, p. 937. [65] Much light is thrown on this question by the prose poems “La eternidad”, “El tiempo” and “El poeta y los mitos” (Ocnos, Prosa, pp. 23, 28 and 31 respectively). [66] It is interesting to note that Cernuda specifically alludes to “Lázaro. as one of his Browning-inspired poems (Historial, p, 923); this sets the date of his reading of Browning considerably earlier than one would have thought. It was written in Cranleigh, which means the autumn or winter of 1938. Resaca en Sansueña. belongs to the period immediately following Cernuda's exile, i.e. to the spring or summer of that same year. It follows that Cernuda was reading Browning a matter of weeks after arriving in England, and was sufficiently struck by his reading to come under Browning's influence at once. The question of how well he read Browning is, of course, unanswerable, though provocative. [67] Historial, p. 928. [68] Poesía, p. 291.

[69] Ibid., p. 386. [70] Poesía, p. 378. [71] Ibid., p. 378-9. [72] Ricardo Gullón, “La poesía de Luis Cernuda” in Asomante, San Juan de Puerto Rico (nos. 2 & 3), 1950, p. 68.

Chapter 3 Cernuda and Yeats* In the previous chapter we examined the effect of Cernuda's reading of Browning upon his own poetry, and suggested that the influence of the latter on the former's technique, in particular, though considerable, was not always beneficial, given the very different temperaments of the two men, and the natural persistence in Cernuda of almost innate stylistic habits. The case of Yeats provides a complete contrast in this regard, so much so that one must give very careful consideration to Cernuda's claim that what he derived from his experience of English literature was not the guidance of influence, in the sense of instruction, but a sense of kinship, of happy coincidence, which confirmed, rather than conformed, his own poetic theory and practice. However, in view of the almost pathological truculence of Cernuda's personality, especially where debts were concerned[1], we would do well to tread warily in considering the undisputed fact of the intersection of his creative trajectory with that of a number of English language poets. In order understand Cernuda's extreme sensitivity on the question of influences, we must go back to the earliest phase of his career. The critical reception accorded to his first collection, Perfil del aire, opened a wound which was never properly to heal and, though the matter has been sensibly and sensitively dealt with by Derek Harris[2], it is enlightening, for our purposes, to glance briefly at the elaborate defence of his own independence which Cernuda constructed in the “diálogo ejemplar” entitled El crítico, el amigo y el poeta[3]. If one considers that, when this dialogue appeared, over twenty years had elapsed since the publication of Perfil, one gets some idea of the impact early adverse criticism had on him and of the obsessive desire to extricate himself from what he saw as the damning implications of discipleship. He is most categorical and most convincing when dismissing the idea that he was imitating Guillén, and Harris corroborates this, greatly reducing the extent of the possible influence of the author of Cántico[4]. But Cernuda goes further, quite properly pointing to the influence of Mallarind, and adding for good measure the names of G6ngora, Garcilaso, Manrique, Aldana, Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Quevedo and Calderón. A careful reading of Perfil, and of the definitive versions of the poems entitled Primeras poesíass in the complete works, shows that Cernuda only slightly exaggerates. It is also true that, in later collections, all these influences, and more, are entirely apparent, so that Cernuda's argument, allowing for a telescoping of the time sequence, is in the end vindicated. The problem arises, however, with his introduction of the concept of “tradition” as a global term to cover every variety of influence. It seems clear that Cernuda benefitted in this dialogue from Eliot's important essay, oTradition and the Individual Talent”[5], though he perhaps unnecessarily restricts the scope of the concept of tradition in his own use of the term. He states his position quite flatly:

Aunque no podemos escoger nuestra tradición, podemos y debemos descubrirla y hacerla nuestra, porque no basta con heredarla.[6]

And this is the point: the word “heredar” limits the range of the possible tradition, which is virtually confined to the poets of one's native language, or, at the outside, can include only those foreign authors appearing in the tradition through the fitter of a genuine” member who stamps the newcomer with his authority. Such is the case of Mallarmé, who enters Cernuda's tradition via Góngora: Precisamente por Góngora fue a Mallarmé, y por Góngora halló familiar alguna parte de la poesia francesa.

This restriction of Eliot's more generous notion of tradition explains the intemperance of “el amigo's” reply to the critic's leading question: “Pero en su amigo Cernuda hay diferentes y más tardías influencias extranjeras”, the critic smoothly points out, and it is almost with a snarl that the friend rounds on him: ¿A qué cansarnos enumerando todas las influencias posibles que sobre él actuaron? ¿No bastaría con decir que Cernuda estuvo vivo, y aprendió de todos aquellos de quienes tenía que aprender, y también, y no poco, de sí mismo?[7]

Of course Cernuda learned from himself and by himself, and of course it would be absurd to plod through his poems, line by line and page by page, gleaning whatever scraps of influence, coincidence or imitation happened to offer themselves. But Cernuda's poetry is remarkable not only for its quality and its profound originality, but also because, like the work of other great modern poets –and Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Pessoa and Kavafis are only the most obvious examples– in its characteristic operation it tends to draw the strands of experience into a tighter pattern, an encompassing form of art as a distinct manifestation of awareness. Art is thus postulated as a unique way of registering experience coherently, and this almost inevitably means that its points of reference are other works of art, other theories of artistic value, and the general notion that the history of a people is the history of its culture. Such poetry is naturally allusive, intricate, vibrant with the echoes and reverberations of the voices of living and dead artist. It forms clusters, pockets of significance, “radiating centres”[8] in apparent isolation. It is the reader's task to piece these together, to gather the fragments and rearrange them until they form a whole tense with significance. And not from any gratuitous desire for modishness or spurious modernity, but because the disintegration of the sensibility (or its “dissociation”, as Eliot phrased it) and the fragmentation of experience is the profoundest, the most marked mode of the life of the twentieth-century mind, at least in the first five decades. The immediate causes of this state of affairs are well known, and it is almost trite to rehearse them here. The enormous advances of technology have an intimidating and belittling effect on the psyche; the progress of biology and psychology has disrupted traditional notions of the nature and limitations of man; the erosion of traditional forms of religion has left our status in the universe un certain; and the enormous barbarity and cruelty displayed most significantly in the two world wars questions to the very depths the value of what we are fond of calling “civilisation”, together with its concomitant ethical considerations.[9]

It is in this context that Cernuda's poetry is to be understood. If his work represents, in Octavio Paz's felicitous phrase, a “biografia espiritual”[10], it is in the same sense as Pound's “periplum” stands for the voyage of a mind over experience, for a sailing after knowledge. These voyages of discovery lead the poet into the realm of the unknown, and what he fishes up may be what Yeats called “rich dark nothings” which can only be interpreted in the light of a significant tradition, a tradition which the poet will have to construct for himself. Such spiritual biography may, therefore, be exemplary, but not didactic in the manner of, say, Dryden or Pope, or even Wordsworth or Shelley. There is an ethical dimension, but it is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic, and is as different from traditional morality -even in the religious poetry of Eliot- as Yeats's technique in “Meditations in Time of Civil War” is from Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode”. This is not to say that Cernuda's poetry agrees at all points with the scheme we have developed here, but no other Spanish poet of his time came into such dynamic contact with the experiments in poetry then going forward in western Europe and America, and it is this new awareness of the poem as an artefact made by the mind working, under pressure, on experience, rather than as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, that is clearly stamped on the poetry of his early middle age, written in Britain and the United States. Of the three poets we have mentioned, Yeats was closest to Cernuda precisely because he was the least “advanced” in his handling of modern poetics, as we shall be seeing. As to the reasons why Cernuda should, if not quite deny English influences, at least try to throw his reader off the scent, one can only surmise that he feared a repetition of the hostility he thought he detected in the Guillón episode, and since the work of the English poets was not, in his view, well known in Spain, he was worried that to the charges of evasiveness, irascibility, coldness and hypersensitivity made against him personally would be added the damning one of obscurity in his poetry. But he cannot, in all honesty, have been unaware of the fascination certain English poets exercised over him, and he cannot have expected the averagely careful reader, with the right sort of information, to miss these influences in his work. It is, therefore, instructive to see how he deals with the question of influences as they affect another Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez. In a brief essay entitled “Jiménez y Yeats”[11], he discusses the similarity of theme in Jiménez's “Vino, primero, pura” and Yeats's “A Coat”, and he bends over backwards to deny what he had earlier seemed to be taking pains to establish, namely that Jiménez quite possibly imitated Yeats in his poem. His argument is elaborate: Acaso no se trate de “influencia” ni, mucho menos, de “imitación”. Ocurre a veces en la historia literaria el caso de que un poeta, leyendo a otro, puede encontrarse frente a una experiencia que refleja la suya propia, aunque no se hubiera antes dado cuenta de habérsela experimentado. “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,” pudo haber dicho Juan Ramón Jiménez al leer “A Coat”.

But surely this selection by a poet of material from another which he finds suitable to his purposes is precisely what we call influence –imitation or adaptation as the case may be. Moreover, these remarks are one of those breathtaking reversals which are so common in

Cernuda, and which probably reflect both the acrimony of his character and his more controlled and more permanent sense of the demands of justice and scrupulous honesty; for, two years earlier, in his essay on Yeats, he had specifically referred to the imprint of Yeats on Jiménez as “sus coincidencias con J. R. Jiménez o, más bien, sus repercusiones en Jiménez.”[12] This looks like a classic case of seeing the speck in one's neighbour's eye and not seeing the beam in one's own. In any case, given Cernuda's prevarication on the question of influences, we are thrown back on our own impartial examination of the facts. But as it happens there are coincidences in this case between the two poets, though not of the kind Cernuda meant. It has more to do with similarities of character and attitude, and an odd similarity in their poetic development, which may have struck Cernuda from the start. Both poets started out on a slightly naive though earnest Romantic note, which lasted longer in Yeats than in Cernuda. Yeats's misty, visión-haunted pre-Raphaelism, with his evocations of mythical Irish heroes and folk tales, is, of course, very different from Cernuda's intimate compositions on the themes of adolescent desire (Primeras poesías), the groves of Arcady (Égloga) and the pain of vanished love (Donde habite el olvido); but these early attempts are, as it were, equivalent, allowing for the changes in aesthetic taste over a period of forty years or so. In each case, this phase is followed by an intermediate or transitional volume, which for Yeats was The Green Helmet, and Other Poems (1910) and for Cernuda was Invocaciones (1934-5), marking for both the discovery of what are to be their most characteristic themes: “A Woman Homer Sung”, “No Second Troy”, “The Fascination of What's Difficult”, “The Mask”, and “All Things Can Tempt Me” in Yeats's volume, and “A un muchacho andaluz”, “Soliloquio del farero”, “La gloria del poeta”, “Dans Ma Péniche” and “A las estatuas de los dioses” in Cernuda's, adumbrate themes both return to again and again in their maturity. The next stage, crucial for both, is reached by way of what we may broadly call politics. Yeats's collection Responsibilities was published in 1914, the year the First World War broke out, and in both title and contents it displays a new awareness of the immediate problems of day-to-day living in an Ireland threatened by war from the outside, and by ominous rumblings within. (Easter 1916 in only two years off, and the civil war, though somewhat more distant, is becoming a distinct possibility.) As we already know, Cernuda's equivalent volume, Las nubes, was born directly out of his reactions to the civil war, and was finished in exile. It is less restrained than Yeats's collection, amongst other reasons because, in the case of Spain, the war had come comparatively suddenly and its effects were, in consequence, the more brutal for the individual mind reflecting on them. These national conflicts had cataclysmic consequences for both men, involving a dramatic reappraisal of aesthetic values and poetic techniques. Out of their passionate commitment to idealised visions of their native countries torn by internal strife sprang the seed from which the best poetry of both was to grow. One difference, we have already suggested in another context: whereas Yeats's poetry grew steadily in precision and authority virtually until he died –masterpieces like “Long-legged

Fly”, “John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore” and “The Circus Animals' Desertion” are from his last years– Cernuda's last poems deteriorate into irritability, prosiness and a destructive personal animosity, the result, probably, of spiritual exhaustion, disillusionment and aloof unhappiness. As for the occasional similarity of tone or attitude, we have already dwelt at some length on Cernuda's habitual haughtiness and acerbity. In Yeats there is a frequent tone of autocratic pride –which has made him the butt of many a “mocking tale or a jibe” in certain intellectual circles in Ireland– and to this arrogance, on occasion, unrestrained anger is added. Words like “anger”, “Krage”, “frenzy”, “passion”, “hatred”, etc., spill out of Yeats's mature poetry with such abandon that one might think them, on this evidence alone, the ravings of a dotard, the splenetic outpourings of a soul dissatisfied with itself and its lot. Though there is some truth in this, it must be added that the energy of the passion is often self-directed, and is closely linked both with a frequent pose of Yeats's and with an important element in his ethical system and, paradoxically, in his concept of love. For the moment, it will be sufficient to note that, in the last works of each poet, what, in Cernuda, is often mere grumpiness or spite is commonly, in Yeats, a willed rage, the splendid anger of Lear or Timon, both of whom are present in “An Acre of Grass”: “Grant me and old man's frenzy, Myself I must remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till truth obeyed his call; A mind Michael Angeto knew That can pierce the clouds, Or inspired by frenzy Shake the dead in their shrouds; Forgotten else by mankind, An old man's eagle mind.”[13]

Here we notice Yeats's typical association of fierceness of spirit with clarity of visión; the ferocity is concentration and intensity rather than impotent rage, and the vision is essentially poetic. The truth involved is the truth as Blake conceived it, i.e. the truth, not of mathematics and of philosophy, but of the imagination (insofar as this excludes a certain idea of philosophic truth). Blake, Michael Angelo, Lear and Timon are the chosen emblems of the artist because what they have in common is concentrated energy, the single-mindedness of sheer will which represents the imagination working at the height of its power. The barriers concealing truth can be broken down by the mind alone, but apparently this might can set the dead trembling, for, in “All Souls' Night”, communion with the dead is essential to a right knowledge of the living, and tenacity of thought is required to achieve it: “Nothing can stay my glance Until that glance run in the world's despite To where the damned have hurled away their hearts, And where the blessed dance;

Such thought (have I), that in it bound I need no other thing, Wound in the mind's wandering As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.”[14]

However, Yeats's highly individual combination of passionate energy with poetic revelation and abstract thought –culminating in the notion of the poet as seer, inherited from Blake and the Biblical tradition of frenzied, physical prophets– though it is very different from anything we find in the pensive, intimate attitude of Cernuda's meditative poetry, is only one feature of his complex and highly flexible handling of the mask of the ageing poet. In other manifestations, this mask is the means he chooses to objectify his ethical aims. One of his most characteristic themes at such times, and one that Cernuda takes over from him, is the persistence of sexual desire in old age. These two features coalesce, in both poets, in their development of the theme of time and its destructive effects on beauty, leading in both to an ultimately tragic vision of human life. Before we examine the specific coincidences between the two, it may be useful to consider Cernuda's evaluation of the work of the Irish poet, concentrating on the features Cernuda consciously held to be paramount in Yeats's poetry, though without ignoring the question of Cernuda's judgements of Yeats's opinions and interests. Among Cernuda's pronouncements on Yeats, the simplest is that included in “Entrevista con un poeta”[15]. Asked to name his favourite modern poets, Cernuda included Yeats among them, adding “aunque su nacionamismo irlandés me parezca exagerado, así como antipática la parte de seudofascismo de su ideología.” The latter part of this remark has probably lost much of its sting for the modern reader of Yeats, thought it is interesting confirmation of the ideological fidelity of Cernuda at this period. Nevertheless, it is doubtful, whatever one may think of Yeats's peculiar stances on crucial political matters, whether Cernuda is doing more than to repeat literary gossip, as he makes no further mention of the issue in his writings on Yeats. However, the matter of Yeats's Irish nationalism is alluded to in Cernuda's essay “Yeats”, written in 1960[16], and it is important both because of the specifically Irish nature of so much of Yeats's writing, and because of Cernuda's little-known intimate patriotism, which we discussed in the previous chapter. Cernuda is explicit and contemptuous in his dismissal of Yeats's nationalist feelings: Otra cuestión a tener en cuenta respecto de Yeats es la de que todo lo que escribe en cuanto irlandés lo escribe para servir a la causa nacional de Irlanda y de su independencia ( ... ) De ahí el nacionalismo a ultranza (una de las cualidades menos simpáticas en Yeats para quien esto escribe) y su antipatía hacia Inglaterra, adonde por lo demás pasó largas temporadas y donde tuvo no pocos amigos. Es cierto que Inglaterra tiene una deuda histórica con Irlanda, a la que oprimió durante siglos; mas por su parte Irlanda, al menos para alguien como yo, poco enterado acerca de dicho pais, no parece haber tenido otra razón para existir que su tenaz oposición a Inglaterra.[17]

Now it is one thing for Cernuda to express his distaste at what he obviously considered the exaggeration of Yeats's nationalism, and quite another for him to speak so disparagingly of a country about which he confesses to be absolutely ignorant, especially in this astonishingly indelicate and naive way. His casual dismissal of Ireland's raison d'être is anything but

enlightened; this is hardly a liberating stance for an exile who had experienced in his own person the effects of political oppression. One is, therefore, forced to recall Cernuda's irrationally high regard for Castile's history, not excluding its policy of domination; and the suspicion cannot be avoided that Cernuda is here seeing Ireland from the metropolitan's point of view, with all the prejudice and limitation that implies. He now compounds the insult with a boutade which is halfway between ignorance and something much coarser, delivered as a footnote to the foregoing: “Recuerdo haber visto una antología titulada ‘Mil años de poesía irlandesa’.’C'est un peu trop.’”

This remark is, if anything, in worse taste than the previous one, since it disparages an entire culture by ignoring it. A few seconds of reflection, or a simple question put to almost any inhabitant of the English-speaking world, would have provided him with the information that Ireland has an ancient culture and language of her own, and that the English connection is of comparatively recent date. What a difference from the ecstasy of the thousand years of Castile! Of course, the real point here is not Cernuda's distorted view of Irish history, but the resultant distorsion of his reading of Yeats's poetry, much of which involves a personal and anguished response to the plight of the nation, and commands the reader's respect, if nothing else. A brief glance down the list of titles of Yeats's Collected Poems will give an idea, albeit an imperfect one, of how much Cernuda was cutting himself off from. Crucially, this list of “proscribed” poems would necessarily include the bulk of Yeats's work on political themes, and, as we have mentioned, it was precisely through his acceptance of a social and public rô1e, and the sense of commitment to a suprapersonal ideal in Responsibilities and thereafter that Yeats's poetry moved away from late Romanticism into the realm of modern poetry. In fact, a poem like “Easter, 1916”, though considerably later (Michael Robartes and the Dancer, to which it belongs, was published in 1921) turns on the tensions of a mind torn between a private worship of love, beauty and innocence, and a reluctant but clear-eyed admiration of genuine sacrifice for the sake of a political cause. The ambiguous image of “the stone in the midst of all”, the honest doubt as to the motives of Pearse and his comrades (perhaps “excess of love/Bewildered them till they died' or perhaps “Too long a sacrifice” made “a stone of the heart”) and the oxymoron of the refrain “A terrible beauty is born” sustain the ambiguity of the response, but a climax is reached in the poet's soaring sense of kinship, beautifully expressed in the joy and the pride of the line of poetic benediction that finally unites the personal artistic ideal and the political theme: “I write it out in a verse Macdonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”[18]

Cernuda's surprising insensitivity to some ramifications of the political theme in Yeats

somewhat blurs his view of what was most fundamentally modern and original in Yeats's mature poetry. The American poet and critic M. L. Rosenthal finds, in discursing Yeats's “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” , that the image of the swan that “ has leaped into the desolate heaven” is the point of deepest internalization of all the motifs of the twin sequence into the dreaming knowledge of the speaking self. Man seeks to recreate himself socially through politics and personally through art, and in both cases comes up against the intransigence of impersonal progress.[19]

Rosenthal links this openness to knowledge in the widest sense with the “magnificent, doomed adventure” of Odysseus that is the starting point and one of the central references of Pound's Cantos, and with the creative enterprises of Eliot and Joyce. This has implications not only for the tensions within the poem itself, but for the poet's whole attitude towards poetry, for the explorations of a Pound or a Yeats are, after all, serious efforts to place their objectified awareness in a purview beyond the merely personal.[20]

To be fair, Cernuda does recognise the value of Yeats's “theatre business, management of men”, and the perspectives which this active life gave him for the development of his poetry, though he perhaps oversimplifies in his admiration. Declaring the superiority of Yeats over Jiménez, he suggest that the latter was too exclusively preoccupied with beauty as the prerogative of poetry, and the poetic adjunct par excellence: Pero además del estético, hay otro campo decisivo para la función poética, que Jiménez no tuvo en cuenta, prefiriendo siempre su vida propia y anteponiéndola a todo: el campo de lo ético.[21]

He goes on to write that Yeats's aestheticism, gave way to a more mature and more fulfilling attitude, thanks to his “dura formación humana” as a Republican senator and director of the Abbey Theatre, in contrast with Jiménez's easy life. Though this is somewhat simplistic in its suggestion that Yeats learned the moral virtues through his experience of the value of hard work, and though it also fails to see that Yeats's new awareness has repercussions for the poet's whole conception of life and its relationship with poetry –and not only as a thematic extension or a general raising of the tone, A la Wordsworth– it accords with Octavio Paz's important judgement of Cernuda's Own poetry. For Paz, the fundamental value of this poetry is the ethical intention it reveals: La obra de Cernuda es un camino hacia nosotros mismos. En esto radica su valor moral. Pues aparte de ser un alto poeta –o más bien: por serlo Cernuda es uno de los poquísimos moralistas que ha dado España, en el sentido en que Nietzsche es el moralista de la Europa moderna, y, como él decía, “su primer psicólogo”. La poesía de Cernuda es una crítica de nuestros valores y creencias ( ... ) Como la de Pessoa, su obra es una subversión y su fecundidad espiritual consiste, precisamente, en que pone a prueba los sistemas de la moral colectiva, tanto los fundados en la autoridad de la tradición como los que nos proponen los reformadores sociales.[22]

Lest there should be any misunderstanding of the sense in which he is using “moralist”, Paz shortly afterwards defines precisely what he means by stressing the ethical nature of this poetry. The consonance with the position of Yeats, which we are suggesting is more than mere coincidence, as well as the seminal importance of Paz's essay, perhaps excuse a further lengthy quotation from the Mexican critic:

Pocos poetas modernos, en cualquier lengua, nos dan esta sensación escalofriante de sabernos ante un hombre que habla de verdad, efectivamente poseído por la fatalidad y la lucidez de la pasión. Si se pudiese definir en una frase el sitio que ocupa Cernuda en la poesía moderna de nuestro idioma, yo diría que es el poeta que habla no para todos, sino para el cada uno que somos todos ( ... ) La poesía de Cernuda es un conocerse a sí mismo pero, en la misma intensidad, es una tentativa por crear su propia imagen.[23]

Passion and lucidity, then, are allied to a pressing critical awareness of the inadequacy of our common modes of thought and self-analysis, but the questioning of values, in both poets, is less a question of speaking the truth than of speaking truthfully (“habla de verdad”, Paz incisively says of Cernuda, and this time the emphasis in mine). In both, too, the idea is clearly present that this superior awareness is possible only in the mind of the artist, who is in communication with a tradition and thus is peculiarly receptive to voices which are not always audible to the living and not necessarily limited by the bounds of nature or reality. In fact, such poetic correspondences, to use Baudelaire's term in a slightly altered context, may have more in common with the modes of silence than with those of speech, or with the dead or the yet unborn rather than with the living. We have already noticed this, in passing, In Yeats's “All Souls' Night”. The same poem affords us a more exact statement of the idea: “I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock. Such thought, such thought have I that hold it tight Till meditation master all its parts....”[24]

The important point here is that the poet's raptness, his state of absolute receptivity, is more in the nature of an intuition than of a revelation. The poem communicates rather the urgency and the exaltation of the poet's knowledge that he is in possession of form –or is possessed by form– than of the ultimate significance of that form. Such a vision is significantly different from Keats's “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”, for despite the variety of interpretations of this disputed passage[25], it is clear that Keats is playing, at least partly, on conventional philosophic values of these terms, whereas Yeats, like Cernuda after him, is concerned more with the nature of poetic vision than of its determinable relation with nonpoetic reality. The “holding tight” on to the meditative vision, and the consciousness that that vision is perhaps alien to common experience, are more important than its specific objects. Cernuda absolutely agrees with Yeats on this. In the ruminative “Otros tulipanes amarillos”, brooding on the image of a long-departed lover, he finally comes to a “mummy thought” of dimensions comparable to Yeats's: “Ya en tu vida las sombras pesan más que los cuerpos; Llámalos hoy, si hay alguno que escuche Entre la hierba sola de esta primavera, Y aprende ese silencio antes que el tiempo llegue.”[26]

We shall return shortly to the importance, for both, of the time dimension. Meanwhile, to support the argument that the work of the two poets exhibits unusual parallelism, it would be helpful to set, side by side with the passage quoted from Yeats, the following from “Noche

del hombre y su demonio” : “Amo el sabor amargo y puro de la vida, Este sentir por otros la conciencia Aletargada en ellos, con su remordimiento, Y aceptar los pecados que ellos mismos rechazan.”[27]

Leaving aside the matter of Cernuda's Satanism –perhaps too deliberately Romantic and Baudelairian, and possibly, as we have suggested, overstated by a critic like Luis Antonio de Villena– one immediately sees the moral sense behind Cernuda's criticism of the common mortal's diminished feeling of responsibility, dramatically linked to a courageous assumption of the existential anguish that is the poet's lot (“puro” here can have no other meaningful sense). If we now take this poem and “Otros tulipanes amarillos” together, we obtain a statement of the experience of poetic visión very much akin to Yeats's in “All Souls'Night”: ecstasy; communion with the dead as representatives of the past; the anguish of separation from common experience; and the intuition that the only resolution is the artistic one, the poem itself. Rosenthal holds that Our key modern aesthetic equation is “realisation = resolution” . And realisation is the kick of life, the quickened arousal of emotional consciousness that puts a complex of awareness in perspective.[28]

Accepting that this “ complex of awareness” includes both the particular experience which the poem begins from and the intuitive grasp of what Cernuda, in “Vereda del cuco”, calls “La realidad profunda/Intima y perdurabley” , we approach an encompassing vision of art that identifies, for both poets, the experiences of love and creation. The fountain in which the poet drank of love –which is partly self-love– proves to be a source of Platonic vision: “Y al invocar la hondura Una imagen distinta respondía Evasiva a la mente, Ofreciendo, escondiendo La expresión inmutable, La compañía fiel en cuerpos sucesivos, Que el amor es lo eterno y no lo amado.”[29]

At first sight, this appears to be merely a restatement of the Romantic commonplace, earlier phrased as “No es el amor quien muere, Somos nosotros mismos”[30].

But Cernuda's metaphysics of love, later more tellingly set out in “Poemas para un cuerpo”, identifies a single source of love, death and poetry. Though the shadow of Quevedo looms over the lines “Que si el cuerpo de un día Es ceniza de siempre, Sin ceniza no hay flama, Ni sin muerte es el cuerpo Testigo del amor, fe del amor eterno, Razón del mundo que rige las estrellas.”[31]

the vision goes beyond the Metaphysical conceit of the identity of Eros and Thanatos (“Aceptando la muerte para crear la vida”) and points instead to the primacy of the aesthetic ideal: “Eres tú, y son los idos, Quienes por estos cuerpos nuevos vuelven A la vereda oscura, Y ante el tránsito ciego de la noche Huyen hacia el oriente, Dueños del sortilegio, Conocedores del fuego originario, La pira donde el fénix muere y nace.”

Cernuda is clearly indebted to German Romanticism, in general, and to Hö1derlin in particular, for this modern combination of the “Weltanschauung” of Heraclitus and Plato, but it is doubtful whether he would have departed from these sources in quite the way he does had it not been for his reading of Yeats. In “The Tower”, Yeats had meditated in very similar terms on identical themes. His starting point, implicit in Cernuda (“Cuántas veces han ido en otro tiempo/ Camino de esta fuente....”) is the continuing pressure of desire and its obscure relation with death, but, with the discovery of the intimate relation between sexual possession and knowledge, Yeats arrives at the centre of the quarrel between individual experience and speculative thought. His poem, like Cernuda's, is couched in terms of self-address: Old lecher with a love on every wind, Bring up out of that deep considering mind All that you have discovered in the grave. For it is certain that you have Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing Plunge, lured by a softening eye, Or by a touch or a sigh, Into the labyrinth of another's being.”[32]

“Vereda del cuco” even recalls incidental details of “The Tower”, as, for example, when Cernuda writes: “Para que sea perdido Para que sea ganado, Por su pasión, un riesgo Donde el que más arriesga es que más ama, Es el amor fuente de todo.”

In Yeats's poem, the thought is framed as a question: “Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost?.

–but this hardly stills the echo. What follows, in the magnificent third section, contains the embryo of Cernuda's whole poem: “And I declare my faith: I mock Plotinus' thought And cry in Plato's teeth, Death and life were not Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun, moon and star, all And further add to that That being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar paradise. I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, Poet's imaginings And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things where of Man makes a superhuman Mirror-resembling dream.”[33]

Of course, Cernuda has not taken over the specifically Yeatsian notion of “translunar paradise”, which, in the system set out in A Vision, includes occult and spiritualist elements; nor do we catch in Cernuda the slightly archaic tone in which Greek and Roman culture are referred to. Indeed, Cernuda speaks without admiration, even without much patience, of Yeats's enterprise in A Vision though he adds, with more perception than many later commentators, that Yeats's interest in the occult provided him with useful experiences for his poetry: Pero no fue la poesía interés único en la vida de Yeats; algo más le atraía y le ocupaba, y tal vez ese otro interés benefició al poeta, aunque a algunos nos parezca, acaso por ignorancia del tema, cosa pueril. Ese interés era el de la magia, ocultismo, teosofía o como quiera llamársele.[34]

In any case, the similarities between the two poets are more striking than the differences. In both, the dream of art is a result of the concentration of the mind upon the past, both personal and cultural, and the experience of love is crucially involved in the image of reality which the “bitter soul” and the passionate heart produce. Plato is a recurrent figure in Yeats's later poetry, and a felt presence in Cernuda's; but both ultimately reject the Platonic idea as too abstract, and incompatible with the tragic experience of love. Yeats's rejection is specific in “Among School Children”: “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things”.

But he and Aristotle and Pythagoras are reduced, in a single mocking image, to “Old clothes upon sticks to scare a bird “

and are thus equated with the earlier self-mocking image –something, it need hardly be said, we do not find in Cernuda– when the poet had dismissed the vain memories of his own youthful beauty to assume the reassuringly realistic rô1e of “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.” Like the ending of “Vereda del cuco., that of “Among School Children” exalts the aesthetic vision in terms that tend to keep the sensual experience of love very much before the reader: “O body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”[35]

There are thus aesthetic, sensual and mystical elements in combination in both poems, but before we leave “Vereda del cuco” it is worth looking at one last, faint echo of Yeats's manner which haunts the final verses, and which recalls the two Byzantium poems. “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” are, of course, two of Yeats's best known poems, and were written respectively before and after Among School Childrem” and “The Tower”, which we have suggested as sources for Cernuda's poem. Furthermore, as Cernuda translated “Byzantium”, it seems reasonable to assume that he knew both this and its companion piece well, and was probably attracted by them. The theme of both is art and its relation to time, and they examine the individual's experience of the process of ageing, the flux of historical time and the continuing lash of desire, “the fury and the mire of human veins.. In the earlier poem, the speaker addresses the “sages standing in God's holy fire”, begging them to draw him into supranatural union with them: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.”[36]

However, this is no pious desire for union with the God of conventional piety, but a plea for admittance into the undying realm of form (“such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/Of hammered gold and gold enamellingo), i.e. the form of living image in art. The colder “Byzantium- intellectualises these images (“miracle, bird or golden handiwork”) but retains the purifying fire as the central symbol of artistic achievement: “At midnight on the emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance...[37]

The intensity of these images, and their crucial rôle in these important and powerful poems, are what Cernuda was remembering in the closing lines of “Vereda del cuco” , which I repeat here given the changed light in which we are regarding them: “Eres tú, y son los idos, Quienes por estos cuerpos nuevos vuelven A la vereda oscura, Y ante el tránsito ciego de la noche Huyen hacia el oriente, Dueños del sortilegio, Conocedores del fuego originario, La pira donde el fénix muere y nace. “

The parallels seem to me almost eerily exact. Allowing for incidental differences of tone, and alterations in the category of the images, the function of the image and the direction of the thought are remarkably alike. Cernuda also posits a community of privileged spirits who, following their impassioned intuitions of suprasensible reality attained through experiences of love, fly (eastwards) away from the sublunary disasters of change, rupture or complexity.

The image of the phoenix is only superficially different from Yeats's presiding divinity, for the fabulous bird is God-like in its miraculous capacity to transcend death; it also recalls Yeats's golden birds which have been shaped into thetranscending forms of art. And, of course, Yeats's sages are recognisable in Cernuda's “Dueños del sortilegio,/Conocedores del fuego originario”, for they too are guardians of the sacred and purifying flame as well as products of its power. Thus, though, as we said earlier, it is sometimes quite difficult to decide whether resonances in Cernuda's poetry are mere coincidence or actual influence, and though it is naturally impossible to determine whether even such clear correlations between the work of the two poets as we have been discussing here is conscious or unconscious “influence”, there is no real doubt that something is transferred from one poet to the other. Moreover, the status of Yeats's poetry was such even in his own lifetime that it must have exerted a very powerful attraction over the rapidly maturing mind of Cernuda. And Cernuda shows himself to be an intelligent and incisive critic and commentator of other people's work, apart from some natural, though not always very attractive, personal hostilities. His judgement of the value of Yeats's work was accurate, and his intuition of its considerable possibilities as a model, or perhaps more strictly, as guidance for his own practice, must obviously have been based on a correct perception of the features of Yeats's poetry which were already, and coincidentally, present or latent in his own. Some of these “coincidences”, we have already mentioned, but something should now be said about two related questions, concerning, respectively, thematic and stylistic parallels. By thematic parallels, I mean the effect given by both poets of returning time and time again to a fairly tight little groups of common major themes, and reworking them in accordance with their growing grasp of their craft, the intensity of their experience or the fluctuating power of their intuition. In both poets, the principal themes are love, time, death and art, and it would be reasonable to assume, on the basis of the immediately preceding argument, that Cernuda, having noticed Yeats's fondness for these themes of his own –which, naturally, interested him long before he had ever read a page of Yeats– began to examine Yeats's handling of them and, in the process, picked up hints about their possibilities and their interrelations. We have been discussing the combination in both poets of the themes of art and love;´in particular, but one characteristic theme of Cernuda's, which all his major critics have discussed, is that of time. In a recent article, I outlined the idea of an active principle in his poetry, which he repeatedly designates “la mirada”, but which has obvious connections, for the English-speaking reader, with the Romantics' Imagination and Wordsworth's “inward eye”[38]. The deployment of this restlessly investigative principle between the world of nature and the realm of cognition instantly produces a feeling of strangeness, isolation and solitude, but the anguish of estrangement from the apparent unity of the world of inanimate nature is compensated for, though never eliminated, by the sudden intuition of analogies and correspondences, what Cernuda calls “posibles paraísos”[39] which constitute the basis of

the poetic experience of beauty. But, with the realisation that beauty, too, is subject to decay, the countervailing force of temporality asserts itself, and in this one-sided battle, the imagination returns to its (original?) home in the mind, and the idea of beauty is the more lovingly asserted in art for the poet's intuitive understanding of its evanescence. Though, clearly, there is neither time nor place in an essay of this scope for anything more than a broad outline of this complex issue, it does seem important to stress the philosophical basis of the time theme in both Yeats and Cernuda especially as the latter, in particular, is too often decribed as a “Romantic”, poet, with the accompanying suspicion that this may mean, somehow, a naive poet, a species of gifted warbler[40]. Diego Romero de Solís, in a recent essay on the philosophical basis of Romantic and postRomantic poetry[41], puts the matter this way: La poética arranca de lo posible y lo soñado, de una ensoñación especulativa que la conciencia ontológica no ya sugiere, sino que exige como necesidad (necesidad de un juego intelectual de una sensibilidad que sustente una imaginación corporeizada). Hay un vacío en la existencia que tan sólo la creación puede llenar –el sentido trágico de la “poiesis”– como reconstrucción imaginaria que la razón ha de armonizar en el análisis de la realidad. Al vacío del espíritu que del tedio pasa a la desesperación, de la visión turbia a la falta (a la ceguera), responde una actividad amplia, pero que en el marco de nuestro discurso parece querer condensarse en un pensarniento poético, manera de filosofar que expresa lo que el conocimiento científico no puede explicar, y que habla no del “es” sino de lo posible, de la experiencia abierta, lejana e inquietante del símbolo.

In the very next line, he quotes Nerval: “Creí comprender que entre el mundo externo y el mundo interno existía un vínculo ... “

Now, Romero de Solís is, as it happens, talking of the nature of the analytic imagination (p. 227) and of the value of the poetic symbol, but, though he specifically converts this into a life-enhancing principle, or, indeed, category, opposed to the “dead” concept and what he calls the “faculty” of nostalgia –thus tending to deny, perhaps, the, temporal nature of these ideas– it is at least possible, and one might feel actually desirable, to see that “lo posible y lo soñado”, the “vacuum” of existence and the tragic conception of poetry have unavoidably to do with time, and that the link between the external and the internal glimpsed by Nerval is no other than the poetic imagination, the “dream” of love, for example, which is one of those moments “both in and out of time” which Eliot is so concerned with in Four Quartets, and which, we are suggesting, form the basis of the artistic vision which Cernuda follows Yeats in seeing as paramount. What imagination “ reconstructs” is not the facts of an event or an experience, but an intuition of their value, and this is not something which reason must necessarily bring into harmony with an analysis of what Romero de Solís is pleased to call “reality”. Indeed, one may well feel that the philosopher, in his admirable analysis of the composition and coherence of the poetic symbol, has entirely omitted any examination of its origin or its function, both of which are, however, implied in his terminology, and present in the quotation from Nerval. These would be, respectively, the idea of isolation consequent upon his experience of beauty subject to time, and the construction of an image which, while revealing the agony of this origin, will nevertheless also point to the durability of the experience itself.

It is hardly surprising that this sense of Nerval's idea should be present in Los hijos del limo[42], an essay on Romantic and modern poetry by one of Cernuda's Is best critics, Octavio Paz, for it is quite possible that he had Cernuda in mind when looking for the title and dedication to his book. The motto, from which the title derives, is from Nerval: “Mais l'oracle invoqué pour jamais dut se taire; Un seul pouvait au monde expliquer ce mystère: –Celui qui donna l'âme aux enfants du limon.”

In “Quetzalcoatl” this idea appears in the question, “¿Quién le dio al fango un alma?”, the word immediately preceding being “soledad”[43]. This cannot be pure coincidence: the “trágico ocio del poeta”, is precisely the consequence of his gift of imagination, and implies both solitude –which is not necessarily “ontological” , as Silver holds[44]– and an ironic consciousness of the disparity between the common notion of time and the “eternity”, however brief, of aesthetic experience. Paz goes further, and holds that the equation “ aesthetic =erotic” is crucial to this poetry: Como sus predecesores románticos y simbolistas, los poetas del Siglo XX han opuesto al tiempo lineal del progreso y de la historia, el tiempo instantáneo del erotismo, el tiempo cíclico de la analogía o el tiempo hueco de la conciencia irónica.[45]

This identification of the experiences of love and poetry is one which Cernuda specifically makes[46], and as we have seen, it underlies the mature Yeats's concept of poetry. Paz, in a different essay, makes the further point that the common origin of “natural” or colloquial language in English and Spanish poetry is not Wordsworth, but Jules Laforgue, “el maestro de Eliot y Pound.”[47] It might also be added that, in Pound's case, at least, it was Yeats who told him to look to Paris for guidance on how to make it new; and, since Paz has already mentioned Pound, rather than Browning or Eliot, as Cernuda's model in certain of his later poems[48], the trail seems once again to lead back to Yeats in our investigation into the sources of the development of Cernuda's middle style and the central position now occupied by the coalescence of the aesthetic and erotic visions. This view is not taken by Derek Harris, who argues on similar grounds for an essentially thematic and psychological approach to Cernuda's poetry. Citing Paz's distinction between the “amor activo” of the early poems, and the “amor contemplativo” of the later work, he concludes that “this most useful and perceptive distintiction” helps us to understand “Cernuda's attempt to use his past to reach understanding of his present self”[49]. This ultimately leads the critic to see in “El Arbol “a “reversal of the attitude of “Vereda del cuco” where he was able to console himself that his own desire could live on in the desire of the new generation of young people.”[50] But “the new generation of young people” seems a somewhat lame, and much too brief, paraphrase of Cernuda's lines: “Mira esas otras formas juveniles Bajo las ramas donde silba el cuco, Que invocan hoy la imagen Oculta allá en la fuente, Como tú ayer; y dudas si no eres

Su sed hoy nueva, si no es tu amor el suyo, En ellos redivivo, Aquel que desde el tiempo inmemorable, Con un gesto secreto, En su pasión encuentra Rescate de la muerte, Aceptando la muerte para crear la vida.”[51]

There are elements here –the image, the fountain, the idea of constant renewal, and especially the notions of redemption and creation– which point to something much more arcane and much more rarefied than the mere mechanical continuity of the species or the appearance upon the scene of fresh specimens of “ Lusty Juventus”. The pride, the beauty and the potency of youth are, of course, part of the meaning, but “rescate de la muerte” definitely points back to the poet's rô1e in the Lorca elegy, and the “life “created cannot be other than the life of the mind, or the creative imagination, which is so obviously meant by these terms elsewhere in Cernuda. Finally, and one would think, conclusively, Paz himself seems to have intended his distinction to be understood in this sense, for he is exalting, not humbling, the mature poet's vision when he writes, immeditately before the phrase picked up by Harris: La diferencia de tono muestra el sentido de su evolución espiritual: en el segundo texto, cl amor ya no es inmortal, sino eterno, y el “nosotros” se convierte en “lo amado”. El poeta no participa: ve.[52]

Thus, when Harris states, as a general truth of Cernuda's poetry, that “Beauty, and the pursuit of beauty in the artifact, can redeem the wretchedness of human existence”[53], it becomes important to add that such beauty must be conceived, not in abstract, but in direct sensuous terms, as an actual state of mind of the poet or the lover (only Shakespeare's lunatic is missing from the famous trilogy that are of imagination all compact.) and even as an actual state of mind of the poet who is or has been a lover. For it is this latter condition that justifies Harris's quotation, in this regard, of the remark Cernuda makes about Don Quijote, viz: Aunque dentro de su alma existe acaso la creencia de que las cosas no son como él dice que las ve, no irnporta: conviene embriagar la razón y transformar la mísera realidad de los hombres, que tan divina pudiera ser sólo con añadirle un poco de exaltación.[54]

Cernuda's thought here is assuredly a product of the feeling intellect: it is not so much a “seeing” that Paz's “ve” implies as what Heidegger might have called a oseeingthrough”. Through a sensuous apprehension of beauty, then, and the concomitant experience of love, the imagination of both poets comes to dwell on the wasting effects of time. What time did to Maud Gonne is well enough known, and Martínez Nadal has gone some way towards providing us with the identity of at least one of the lovers whom Cernuda was later alternatively to exalt and contemn for his beauty, capriciousness and egoism[55]. But the personalities cannot concern us here. What does concern us is how these experiences, in exciting or baulking the desire of the two poets, finally provided them with both a theme and a highly original way of exploiting it. In both this involved an aesthetic vision sub specie aeternitatis. Yeats's first strong statement of this occurs in the preliminary poem to Responsibilities, “The Grey Rock”, in which “one that was like a woman made. complains, in a conclave of the

gods of ancient Ireland, about the faithlessness of a mortal lover: Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces? Why must the lasting love what passes, Why are the gods by men betrayed?”[56]

The mystery as to the identity of the speaker, the winedrenched frivolity of this Hibernian Olympus, and even the ultimate obscurity of the italicised speaker leave the quoted words at the centre of the poem, with a resonance that carries over into the vastly more ambitious “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, written long after. In the latter poem, the question that is asked in Part I affects all the subsequent sections, though it is now divorced from any idea of superstition and is posed, as it were, this side of mortality: “But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say ?”[57]

Though the theme of time is vast in Cernuda's work, Yeats's lines readily send the mind back to the first poems of Como quien espera el alba in which Cernuda seems to follow Yeats in the very imagery. Hölderlin is probably the immediate source, but set this beside Yeats: “Tú no debes morir. En la hermosura La eternidad trasluce sobre el mundo Tal rescate imposible de la muerte.”[58]

These are Jupiter's words to Ganymede, and they indicate, in the code we are learning to decipher, both the identification of poet with god, and the divine vision of passion as source and recompense of the artist's solitude. Furthermore, if Yeats is classical in his evocation of the gods of the Irish tradition, what can be said of Cernuda's adoption of Roman mythology? “Para bien y para mal,” writes Octavio Paz, “los españoles sienten cierta dificultad en ser rnodernos.”[59] But Cernuda is not content to leave it at a classical allusion, for his purpose is to examine the notion of the sensuous in time: “¿Es la hermosura Forma carnal de una celeste idea, Hecha para morir? Vino de oro Que a dioses y a poetas embriaga, Abriendo sueños vastos como el tiempo, Quiero hacerla inmortal.”[60]

The last line points unmistakably to Mallarmé and the Symbolist tradition, which was so important in Yeats's development, and, as we have said, was present in Cernuda's poetry from the very beginning. Though it is true that Cernuda occasionally lapses into an inflated and pompous style, close at times to the dullness of neo-clas-sicism, we do, surely, feel that his use of certain of the symbols of antiquity is more than just the rhetoric of a “clasicismo de yeso”[61]. Paz's further charge that there are “demasiados dioses y jardines” is one of those statements that it is impossible to refute and, at the same time, impossible to assent to. How many gods and gardens would be enough? And is there “too much” blue in Mallarmé, or Picasso?

Concentrating on the content of these symbols, and admitting with Paz that the diction of some of these middle period poems is sluggish, one must see that Cernuda's use of them is not neo-Classical or even properly Romantic. They do not passively stand for a bygone culture, but actively present a modern view of this and all other cultures: they are the steadiest reminders of the conflation in Cernuda's thought of the primacy of art and the desolation of time. Even the gods, whom, in Cernuda's scheme, man conceives, are subject to decomposition, but before they fade from the memory of history they shed the seeds of fire from which new art springs, as the poet, before time obliterates him, “gathers from the air a live tradition”, as Pound put it. And it was Pound, too, who stressed that what the poet sees is, from generation to generation, “now in the mind entire”. As for the tragic implications of this view, for both Yeats and Cernuda they would seem to be the necessary condition of their peculiar view of art itself. Man, Yeats says, is in love with what vanishes, but only the artist dare contemplate this possibility: “only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.”[62]

Again and again Yeats returns to the idea that isolation and solitude are inseparable from the poet's condition, and even that the insidious doubt as to the permanence of “master-work of intellect and han” is, paradoxically, his only effective consolation, for “all triumph would But break upon his ghostly solitude.”[63]

The same idea is repeated in Part Ill: “For triumph can but mar our solitude”.

The sense seems to be twofold: that professional success would lead to intolerable invasion of the privacy in which the poet's dreaming knowledge is sought; and that conviction would be still-born, since it would deprive the aesthetic experience of the tensions of emotional cornmitment, of the vertiginous proximity to error, which distinguish image from concept. But the obvious danger remains: moral or political commitment may be right, after all. The poet is thus “caught/In the cold snows of a dream”[64], haunted by the fear that art itself may be an illusion, as transitory as the reality it seeks to penetrate and immortalise. Anguish, isolation, doubt, perplexity -such is the price the poet pays for his privileged insight, and it is this paradox which makes Cernuda's conception of “el trágico ocio del poeta” more than mere rhetoric. Cernuda's version of these paradoxes is more melodic, more resigned than Yeats's, though he perhaps shirks, at least in his poetry, facing the final consequences of such thought, namely that poetry itself may be a self-deluding enterprise: “Mas los hombres, hechos de esa materia fragmentaria Con que se nutre el tiempo, aunque sean Aptos para crear lo que resiste el tiempo, Ellos en cuya mente lo eterno se concibe, Como en el fruto el hueso encierran muerte.”[65]

Perhaps, however, he does glance at the deadly notion in the ambiguity of como. in these lines from the same poem: “Todo lo que es hermoso tiene su instante y pasa. Importa como eterno gozar de nuestro instante.”

In any case, the strategy for both poets is the same, for, if there is any reality, it is in the life of the mind, the conscious, brooding artistic mind, that it must be sought. Yeats's magnificent “Meru” sets out this idea in all its bleak beauty: “Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought. And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening throught century after century, Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.”[66]

The rage and desperation are typical of Yeats at such moments, but, despite the quieter tone, Cernuda is getting at much the same thing in “Río vespertino”, one of his finest poems. He once again declares his faith in the superior nature of the poet's vision, accepting that, in the quiet of thought –what Yeats calls a man's own secret meditation”– the poet is condemned to the task “De ver en unidad el ser disperso, El mundo fragmentario... Sueño no es lo que al poeta ocupa, Mas la verdad oculta, como el fuego Subyacente en la tierra.”[67]

Whether one chooses to see these last lines as an answer to his own doubts –and the word “sueño” is one Cernuda very often uses in connection with art– or to the doubts of others, like Yeats, the very fact that he touches on the issue at all shows how crucial it is to him. Like Yeats, he sees thought, and the tradition of thought, as the centre of civilisation, and the poet's only hope: “Aquella cosa importa De cuya fe conocimiento viene, Piedra angular de las generaciones Que labraron con fe lo no creído, Seguros, no en las cosas que veían, Pues fe no necesita lo visible; Fe, contra toda razón, es algo ciego, Sombra del pensamiento aquietadora.”[68]

Both “Meru” and “Río vespertino” then, deal with man's whole enterprise in striving after knowledge, not of scientific truth, but of the workings of the human heart, the reality of thought. Such knowledge is inevitably unsatisfactory, and is presented by both poets in negative terms: in Cernuda it is blind, a mere shadow, and in Yeats it is a desolation reached through a process of destruction. Hence the rage of the one, the quiet despair of the other: what was to have been the best that can be said or thought is bred in tragic isolation and leads to a vision of emptiness. Since the foundation of the idea of beauty is transience, utter

negation becomes a condition of the poetic imagination. It is suggested that Cernuda developed this idea from Yeats, who had it from Mallarmé. Furthermore, we now have an approach to Cernuda's concept of solitude which is very different from Silver's somewhat perplexing notion of ontological solitude” . It seems simpler to take this solitude as a necessary condition of the poetry, or, if one prefers, a conscious strategy of the poet. Silver holds that solitude is man's common lot, and that the poet tries to fill it with natural beauty or even, curiously, to “merge “ with nature: “Cernuda”, he tells us wants the best of both worlds: the “Sueño divino” which is eternity, and the vegetable well-being of the natural world.[69] Apart from the difficulty involved in becoming a poplar tree, such a view fails to take into account Cernuda's insistence on knowlege, understanding, faith and the life of the mind. In “El nombre”, for example, the contemplation of nature causes the poet to turn his eyes inward, and not outward, as Silver suggests: “Recoge el alma, y mira; Pocos miran el mundo”[70]

One is, incidentally, reminded of Eliot's “I said to my soul, 'Be still'” , and certainly the peace and harmony of nature invite introspection as well as inspection. Moreover, Cernuda is not mooning about among the trees, but intent upon the Movement of creative activity, the mind in the process of forming a poem: “La realidad por nadie Vista, paciente espera.”

Similarly, in the gracious compliment to Jiménez, in “El poeta”, Cernuda identifies this combination of the inward-and-outward-directed gaze, or, perhaps this internalising of universal form, as the source of poetic inspiration: “Gracias por la rosa del mundo. Para el poeta hallarla es lo bastante, E inútil el renombre u olvido de su obra, Cuando en ella un momento se unifican, Tal uno son amante, amor y amado, Los tres complementarios luego y antes dispersos: El deseo, la rosa y la mirada.”[71]

J. Olivio Jiménez finds in this grouping of desire, rose and all-seeing eye of the poet “Los tres protagonistas de drama metafísico: el hombre, la realidad trascendente y el impulso desde aquél hacia éste”[72], and it is possible, in our terms, to substitute “poetic creation” for “dram”, metafísico”, since the entire “realidad v. deseo”opposition can be understood as an analysis of the creative imagination. Returning, then, to Silver's analysis, it may be fel that he is overstating the amount of Cernuda's personal stake in the division into subjective world (Loneliness) and objective world (Nature), thus ignoring the important aesthetic concern. Finally, Silver's remark that Cernuda is a “man speaking for Man”[73] a phrase adapted from Wordsworth, to whom Cernuda is implicitly comparedprobably exaggerates the didactic side of Cernuda's work, and

in any case runs against the main drift of his argument. But if there is one Yeatsian theme that Cernuda took up more than another, it is the continuity of sexual desire into old, or relatively old age. In the note to his translation of Byzantium”, he comments on the rage of Yeats: En el primero de los poemas citados, el tema bizantino se enlaza con cl de la vejez; la vejez, el hecho de envejecer, producía en Yeats un despecho, una rabia que acaso ningún poeta haya expresado antes que él. No se trata de lamentos sentimentales del género de “Juventud, divino tesoro”, sino de un furor impotente que en Yeats encontró expresión acendrada (cosa rara, que pocos hombres, o ninguno, sientan el ultraje que es la vejez).[74]

These remarks are followed by a translation of Yeats's brief poem, oThe Spur” which consists of only two couplets. The fact Cernuda should have seen fit to stress this small thing in connection with his translation of a major poem of Yeats's dealing with the gifts reserved for age” demostrates the extent of his fascination with Yeats's highly personal theme. Though it probably justifies his remark that he was “predisposed. to digest the teachings of certain English poets, one cannot help feeling that some of his most characteristic themes would perhaps never have found expression if it had not been for the example of his models. In fact, Yeats had been dealing with this theme for many years before he wrote “The Spur”, which is from Last Poems. Cernuda, therefore, must have been struck by the constancy as well as the originality of the idea, and the pedigree it had, acquired by the late thirties, for he could easily have chosen as text better known instances, like these: “There's not a woman turns her face Upon a broken tree, And yet the beauties that I loved Are in my memory; I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.”[75] “What shall I do with this absurdity – 0 heart, 0 troubled heart– this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail?”[76] “Did all old men and women, rich and poor, Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, Whether in public or in secret rage As I do now against old age?”[77]

The fact that Cernuda quotes from “The Spur” suggests a close and continuous reading of Yeats, and it may be deduced that he found in the prestige of Yeats's example the moral support and legitimation that enabled him to introduce the delicate theme boldly into his own poetry. (The blatancy of the homosexual element in the love theme from Los placeres prohibidos onwards demons trates clearly enough that he lacked neither the courage nor the conviction to deal openly with personal matters in his poetry.) In fact, in his self-disgust, Cernuda goes much further than Yeats, and there are elements of the “viejo verde” in the stanza of “EI César” which begins “Para el placer soy viejo”, and concludes: “Como babosa sobre pétalo nuevo

Mordiendo sin aliento, en arrebato De rencor placentero, de gozo degradante.”[78]

He never learned to laugh at himself, as Yeats partly does in the lines quoted from “The Tower.. In the same poem, Yeats refers to the persistence of desire in old age as A. sort of battered kettle at the heel”, an image which he later partially condensed into the famous “ragand-bone shop of the heart” in “(The Circus Animals' Desertion” However, though Cernuda never approaches Yeats's wryness, he seems to follow the Irishman in his absolute honesty and in the acid tone of “insobornabilidad” which characterises such lines as these: “El hombre que envejece halla en su mente, En su deseo, vacíos, sin encanto, Dónde van los amores. Mas si muere el amor, no queda libre El hombre del amor: queda su sombra, Queda en pie la lujuria.”[79]

The disarming frankness of the last word recalls Yeats's specific use of the words “lust” and “lecher”, and the contrast between the two senses of “amor” is often present in the poetry of his middle or old age, e.g.: “I have not lost desire But the heart that I had; ……………………………………………………………….. For who could have foretold That the heart grows old?”[80]

However, both poets persistently link this theme to that of beauty, since the heart permanently susceptible to love and beauty, even in the dismal form of lust after the youthfully attractive, is when all is said, the heart of an artist. Though the desire be no more than the painful recollecting of old lovers, “vague memories, nothing but memories”, as Yeats sighingly says in “Broken Dreams”, and though the elderly poet, turned moralist, may come to feel that his experience is merely the common one of the withering of love and the fading of the beloved (“Otros antes que yo vieron un día Y otros luego verán, cómo decae La amada forma esbelta, recordando De cuánta gloria es cifra un cuerpo hermoso”

as Cernuda puts it in “Amando en el tiempo”) neither poet strays far from the notion that his faithfulness to beauty is faithfulness to his art, and that in poetry lies his final vindication, since poetry is knowledge. As late as 1960[81], Cernuda in insisting that “En el poeta la espiritual compleja maquinaria De sutil precisión y exquisito manejo Requiere entendimiento.[82]

It is a statement that stands out both for its rhythmic exactitude and for its fidelity, from an otherwise prosaic piece on the place of Manuel Antolaguirre in Spanish literature. It also

recapitulates a long series of poems on the theme of the poet, maintaining the superiority of the poet's vision of reality; this is based on the selflessness stemming from his capacity for love, his concept of beauty and his ability to withstand disillusionment or “apparent failure”: “El amargo placer de transformar el gesto En son, sustituyendo el verbo al acto, Ha sido afán constante de mi vida. Y mi voz no escuchada, o apenas escuchada, Ha de sonar aún cuando yo muera, Sola, como el viento en los juncos sobre el agua”[83]

Yeats's “To a Young Beauty” similarly ranges over the themes of beauty, knowledge, art and immortality, to conclude in the well known lines: “I know what wages beauty gives, How hard a life her servant lives, Yet praise the winters gone: There is not a fool can call me friend And I may dine at journey's end With Landor and with Donne.”

Such deliberate appeal to earlier tradition is also found in Cernuda's evocations of Lorca, Larra, Góngora, Gide, Goethe, Verlaine and Rimbaud, etc., combining, as does this poem of Yeats's, a personal vigilance in the ethical sphere with both a concept of beauty and a sense of the special knowledge available only in poetry. However, there is a danger in this aloof isolation; for the poet “would find himself and not an image”, and failure in this enterprise could leave him helpless, engaged on the pointless struggle of the fly in the marmalade., in Yeats's homely image: because “art Is but a vision of reality. What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair?”[84]

The gift is thus a source of bitterness, for his special knowledge, being a knowledge of emptiness, brings no release: “Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupified hearts.”[85]

Similarly, for Cernuda, art is ultimately the evocation of a shadow, like the love that is its source: mere representation, memory, desire, the bitter conception of a possibly deceptive beauty, a probably illusory knowledge: “Lo mejor que has sido, diste, Lo mejor de tu existencia. A una sombra ……………………………………………………... …………………………………………………………………….. Y piensas Que así vuelves Donde estabas al comienzo Del soliloquio: contigo Y sin nadie.

Mata la luz, y a la cama.”[86]

Though the thematic parallels between the poetry of Yeats and Cernuda could be developed still more thoroughly, perhaps enough has been said to suggest that there is more than coincidence involved. It is time now to turn to an examination of the stylistic continuity apparent in their work. Although this is a more uncertain sort of terrain –as we shall see, it is considerably easier to tread in dealing with certain parallelisms between Cernuda and Eliot– we cannot leave the subject of Yeats without at least glancing at the idea of the onake& style in poetry, and Cernuda's approach to it through Yeats and his contemporaries in English poetry, for this leads directly on to our investigation into the importance of Eliot's work for Cernuda's poetry. Pound, in a well known passage, described the kind of poetry he wished to see being written: Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language (…) departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity) (…) no book words no straddled adjectives (as “addled mosses dank”) (...) nothing –nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstances, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.[87]

With some reservations, this would not be a ba d description of the style of Browning, whose influence on Pound, as is well known, was considerable; and, bearing in mind the interplay of mutual influence between Pound and Yeats, Pound and Eliot, and Yeats's own admiration of Browning, we arrive at a particularly close-knit set of common attitudes to style in poetry which Cernuda came to share. (Paz has noted the conjunction of the possible influences of Pound and Browning on Cernuda, though he is thinking principally of their similar use of the dramatic monologue, rather than a common attitude to poetic language[88]). Cernuda uses the same words as Pound, in writing, in his essay on Yeats, of “esa sencillez e intensidad que constituyeron su aspiración como poeta.”[89] As he argues throughout Historial, this combination of intensity and simplicity was precisely what he felt to have been the reward for his labours in studying English poetry. Whether Cernuda ever shook off the more sonorous, ponderous and wordy diction of the Spanish tradition may legitimately be questioned, and the beauty of many of the poems of his maturity makes one doubt whether it would have been entirely beneficial if he had. Paz is surely right to speak of “la afectación, cierto amaneramiento del que nunca se desprendió del todo”[90], but perhaps he goes too far in his criticism of the prosiness of Cernuda's poetry at this period. Indeed, his preference for the poetry that goes from Los placeres prohibidos to Invocaciones, and his assertion that it is in the final stage (i.e. Desolación de la quimera) that we find “la mirada más precisa y reflexiva, la voz más real y amarga”[91], probably tells us more about Paz's own poetry than about Cernuda's. Notwithstanding Paz's intelligent and incisive explanation fot the late arrival of Romanticism in Spain[92] and his firm belief that Cernuda was always most essentially a Romantic[93], the accumulated evidence points in another direction. Cernuda, through his contact with English poetry, whether or not he was (“predispose” to receive the influence, moved from the Hö1derlinesque Romanticism of Invocaciones into a Modernist set of preoccupations[94]. This is not to deny the persistence of a traditional tone in Cernuda, which often awakens

echoes of Quevedo and Aldana, among Spanish poets, and Donne and the Metaphysicals generally, among the English. The structure of the magnificent sequence. “Poemas para un cuerpo” is quite probably modelled on Yeats, who came to conceive much of his late poetry in this way; but in spirit, it often goes back to an earlier age. Like Martínez Nadal[95], I am sure I have heard these lines somewhere before: “Fuerza las puertas del tiempo, Amor que tan tarde llamas.”[96]

The tone is certainly Metaphysical in its daring application of Saint Augustine to a deliberately non-spiritual situation: one thinks of Marvell, Donne or Quevedo. Hence, in typical Modernist fashion, Cernuda's final voice is a composite one. In any case, Cernuda's own reaction to what he thought of as Romantic poetry was ambiguous, or frankly negative. He quotes Yeats's attack on vagueness and “feminine” sentiment in poetry, explaining: Lo que (Yeats) censura ahí nos es bien conocido por su contrapartida en lengua española: la poesía modernista, con Darío y Jiménez a la cabeza, adolece de eso, de ser una poesía sentimental, introspectiva, femenina ( ... )” “¿Quién que es no es romántico?” preguntaba Darío. Y ya sabemos lo que, para él, era el ser romántico: ser “sentimental, sensible y sensitivo”.[97]

Thematic coincidences of such proportions, and a stylistic debt as important as we have been suggesting, could hardly fail to result, in at least some cases, in strong parallelisms between passages or entire poems, and this does happen with Cernuda and Yeats. Sometimes the similarity is a matter of a single phrase or line: an example is this passage, already quoted, from Cernuda: “Y mi voz no escuchada o apenas escuchada, Ha de sonar aún cuando yo muera, Sola, como el viento en los juncos sobre el agua”

where the debt to Yeats's “The wind among the reeds” seems obvious. A more interesting case in which the whole conception of the poem seems to be involved occurs with Cernuda's lovely “Los espinos” and Yeats's “The Wild Swans at Coole”. Here, as one would expect, the borrowed element finally gives rise to the personal tone which, in the manner we have discussed earlier, progresses to the poetic vision which heals the breach between time and beauty: “Antes que la sombra caiga, Aprende cómo es la dicha Ante los espinos blancos Y rojos en flor. Ve. Mira.”

The crucial middle stanza: “Cuántos ciclos florecidos Les has visto; aunque a la cita Ellos siempre serán fieles, Tú no lo serás un día”

inevitably recalls Yeats's meditation on the swans in Coole Park, when, reflecting upon the

beauty of the swans and their habitat, and the passing years, he is driven to ponder on the relation between beauty and time: “But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful. Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?”[98]

Of course, Yeats's perspective is different: in his poem it is the swans who will disappear one day, whereas in Cernuda's, the poet contemplates the inevitability of his own death in contrast with the “immortality” of the natural cycle. But this idea is latent in “The Wild Swans”, and besides the conception of the poems is in essence the same, for both start from the contemplation of natural beauty and go on to explore the painful contrast with the evanescence of the individual mind. Once again, the aesthetic faculty is inextricably linked with the idea of time and transitoriness on which, paradoxically, it seems to depend. Yeats dwells on this no less than Cernuda: “I have looked upon these brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore: ………………………………………………………… Their hearts have not grown old.”

Such a vision is thus clearly related to what we have discussed earlier, to Yeats's formulation of the theme: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes”

and to Cernuda's similar approach: “Lo hermoso es lo que pasa negándose a servir”

or “Cuán bella fue la vida, y cuán inútil.”

Another incidental coincidence of detail occurs in the line from “Rio vespertino”: “Verdad es vehemencia de la masa”

recalling Yeats's famous lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”[99]

Both poets are desperately seeking some unchanging centre in a world suddenly given up to violence and chaos (the experience of both men in war and civil war) and both, helplessly adrift on the “ blood-dimmed tide” , bitterly witness the destruction of what had seemed most valuable. In words that recall Quevedo, as J. Olivio Jimé nez has pointed out[100], Cernuda writes: -Ajado en toda cosa está el encanto, ………………………………………………………………….. Con tácita premura en cada ciclo La primavera acerca más la muerte

Y adondequiera que los ojos miren Memoria de la muerte sólo encuentran.”[101]

Faced with the lunacy of fratricidal combat and mob violence, both poets instinctively withdraw into “secret meditation” which if not more comforting, offers at least the semblance of order. This withdrawal leads Yeats to a vision which, however nightmarish, carries for him the certainty of moral conviction, as opposed to the lies and deceptions of political “truth”. In Cernuda's case, though Harris repeatedly accuses him of evasiveness[102], the withdrawal is part of a general strategy of approach to a more genuine knowledge of self and world, one founded not on reason but on “fe (en) lo no creído”, the advantage being superior insight: “Lo renunciado es poseído ahora”.

He is not, therefore, escaping from unpalatable reality –what is “real” about the passionate intensity of the mob? what truth can lie in “ vehemencia de la masa”?– but rather stepping back to gets a clearer view of the whole picture. Whether or not such an attitude to life and to one's fellows considered in the mass is distasteful is another matter. Evidently the aesthetic stance of Yeats and Cernuda leaves them open to the accusation of elitism –a charge. widely made against the Modernist generation– but here we are concerned not to examine the moral or personal implications of the attitude, but simply to see that it is there. If Yeats and Cernuda are guilty of anything, it is not cowardice but contempt. There are Yeatsian echoes, too, in “Otras ruinas”, a poem which deals with the same set of themes. The ruins in this case are the bombed-out buildings in London after the Blitz, and Cernuda broods on the “irónico detalle” revealed by the disappearance of the wall of a house: “tramo de escalera que conduce a la nada Donde sus moradores irrumpieron con gesto estupefacto, En juego del azar, sin coherencia de destino.”[103]

This seems to echo Yeats's lines in Part VII of “Meditations in Time of Civil War”: “The rage-driven, rage-tormented and rage-hungry troop ……………………………………………………………. Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing.”

In addition to the verbal parallels and the coincidence of image, one notes in both poems a hardness, almost a harshness, of tone, which seems, however, to be the product of grim realism rather than of indifference. The bleakness is linked to a moral vision: Yeats's senseless tumult” chimes with Cernuda's “sin coherencia de destino”, and with his description of the city bustle in the pre-war empire-building days: “Su estruendo limbo ensordecedor de la conciencia”.

The mythical, abstract images in Meditationso and the sarcastically realistic language of “Otras ruinas” (especially stanzas 3-6) compose a common vision of emptiness, a common sense of the destruction of an order and the chaos of western civilisation. The difference, though, is that Yeats laments the passing of the days of the “cloud-pale unicorns”, whereas Cernuda sees the war and its aftermath as a fitting end to a rotten civilisation built on greed, lust, vanity and the pathetic enslavement to empty formalities:

“Estéril era esta ciudad” (emphasis added).

However, he returns to what we are suggesting was his model in the last stanza, in the image of the enemy bombers as evil birds swooping upon their prey: “el aire inviolado De donde aves maléficas precipitaron muerte Sobre la grey culpable, hacinada, indefensa, Pues quien vivir a solas ya no sabe, morir a solas ya no [debe.”

We shall return to this passage in the next chapter, with reference to T. S. Eliot. Meantime, the vengeful birds are recognisably close kin to the brazen hawks” of “Meditations”, which have displaced the poets and seers first and the “indifferent multitude” afterwards: “Nor self-delighting reverie Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone, Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency, The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the [moon.”

War, and the symbols and emblems of war, have obliterated the last traces of a civilisation which both poets regard ironically; Yeats, though holding on to his belief in the value of the products of that civilisation, presents the contemporary violence and disfigurement as inevitable consequences of a past the violence of which is somewhat ambiguously glanced at in the mythological imagery; and Cernuda, more scornful and more morally motivated, questions not only the value of the civilisation, but even the humanity of the victims of war who, huddled in their cities like rabbits in their warrens or like sheep in a fold, have lost the right to the last shred of dignity man can lay claim to –the right to die in courageous solitude (like Iñaki Sobrino, the Basque child of “Niño muerto”[104].) The last poem by Cernuda which we shall consider with regard to Yeatsian detail is “Apologia pro vita sua”. The conception of the poem as a dramatic monologue spoken by the poet/moralist on his deathbed is.in the Browning mold. We have already mentioned the continuity between Browning and Yeats, a continuity that involves both style and characterisation. Though we now think of Yeats principally as a great lyric poet, there can be no doubt that his career as a dramatist deeply affected his concept of the lyric. He himself wrote: Browning said that he could not write a successful play because interested not in character in action but in action in character. I had begun to get rid of everything that is not whether in lyric or dramatic poetry, in some sense character in action; a pause in the midst of action perhaps, but action always its end and theme. (Emphasis added).[105]

Like the speaker of “ The Tower “ or “ All Souls' Night”, Cernuda's protagonist summons to his side spectres from the past, and his dying words are a rumination on personal episodes of love and friendship, and on the meaning of life and art and the relation between them. The mouse in the wainscot in Eliot's Four Quartets and the buried mice in the mansion of Yeats's “Ancestral Houses” (Part I of “Meditations”, the next poem in the Collected Works) are quite possibly brought together in the image of the mouse in Cernuda's figurative house (his heart). But it is to “ The Tower” that we should look for the source of much of the detail of

Cernuda's poem. The first and most obvious parallelism is that of situation: Yeats's poem is also a first person meditation –though not exactly a dramatic monologue– spoken by a poet close to the end of his life. Both speakers typically stress the element of passion in their personalities, reflecting wryly on the fact that lust outlives love. Yeats's lines have been quoted earlier; here are Cernuda's: “A mi esos otros cuerpos me enseñaron Que si amor palidece, cuando ya es imposible Creer en la verdad de quien se ama, Crece aún el deseo, y vence con un fuego Presagio de aquellos en infierno ya sin esperanza.”[106]

Like Yeats's protagonist, Cernuda's experiences in love and beauty a dim intimation of immortality, imaged as a soul which mind and body have to forge like a sword: “¿No es la pasión medida de la grandeza humana Y acero templado por su fuego el alma grande?”

This in an idea that Cernuda very possibly developed by telescoping Yeats's “Now shall I make my soul” with the image of the magnificent Samurai sword which acts as an art emblem and a symbol of spiritual achievement in the twin sequence Meditations and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, which follow “The Tower” in the Collected Works. Both poets use the images of the mirror, the bird and the fading light. It should be said that in all cases, Cernuda's handling of the imagery is more naturalistic and Yeats's more symbolic, but the final direction in both cases is towards aesthetic stasis, by which, as should now be obvious, is meant not that these poems neglect reality, or fail to account for their rejection of common values, but that they assume that the important issue, in the end, is not whether the poet should be banished from the Republic, but whether the Republic holds any further interest for the poet. This may sound extreme, but Cernuda thought he knew what “reality” meant, and that it had precious little to do with what is often called “actuality”, whether of the popular or the Aristotelian variety. Yeats's life-long dispute was with Plato and Plotinus, and among Cernuda's favourite philosophers were Heraclitus, Parmenides and Schopenhauer, i.e. philosophers who subjected their metaphysics to the scrutiny of aesthetic experience or who dealt chiefly, if not exclusively, in metaphor. Thus, the mirror of art (Yeats's mirror-resembling dream” which in Cernuda is “ciego”. once the reflected image has vanished), the bird of the soul or conscience (pictured in Cernuda as “herido bajo un ala / Que a tierra viene, mas lucha todavía / Con plumas abolidas que no sostiene el aire”) and the light (life, grace, beauty and the source and haven of thought) represent for both something considerably more versatile and profound than their Romantic or Symbolist lineage might suggest. These and other aesthetic emblems carry, for both poets, an ethical weight in addition to their older burden, and they signify the poets' continued refusal to accept the dictates of mere reason, their commitment to vision, imagination, faith. Each had his quota of Romanticism, but Romanticism was already a devalued coinage, and, as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were available to them, there is no reason not to allow them the

benefit of this post-Romantic and incipient existentialist insight. “We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty”

wrote Yeat[107], and it is a phrase, a mode of thought, with a peculiarly modern flavour. It points back towards the unique experience of the individual consciousness, for the difficulty of communication which afflicts the twentieth century mind springs from this awareness, or intuition, that it is what is most essential to, or characteristic of, the self in its “secret meditation” that is least readily expressible. Perhaps, in the end, it was this attempt to give utterance to the most elusive and yet most dynamic centre of our being that Cernuda admired, and to some extent imitated, in Yeats. “And knowledge the shade of a shade. / Yet must thou sail after knowledge,” wrote Pound, setting out in quest of his unique self. So too, Cernuda, whose aesthetic vision finally rests on this uniqueness of the “mirada”: “igual al árbol A la nube o al agua Que están ahí, mas nuestros Son y vienen de nosotros Porque una vez les vimos Como jamás les viera nadie antes. Un puro conocer te dio la vida.”[108]

* N. B. References to Yeats's poetry are to the Collected MacMillan, London and New York, 1978. [1] We are here referring naturally, to the debts of an expressive or stylistic sort that one writer commonly owes another or others. But it is a curious fact that Cernuda was equally mortified by those of a financial nature, and did everything in his power to pay them quickly and scrupulously, in order, so to speak, to obliterate them as soon as possible. For an amusing account of one such incident in his life, see Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 47-8 and 65, ff. [2] D. Harris, Perfil del Aire, ed. y estudio de Derek Harris, Támesis Books Lid, London, 1971. [3] Prosa, pp. 878-97. [4] Harris, op. cit., pp. 71, ff. [5] T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talenb, in Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1976, pp. 13-22. [6] Prosa, p. 893. [7] Ibid. [8] M. L. Rosenthal, Sailing into the Unknown, O.U.P., New York, 1978, p. 119. [9] See, e.g., George Steiner, Language and Silence (Faber, London) and Ernesto Sábato, Uno y el universo (Barral, Barcelona). [10] Octavio Paz, La palabra edificante, in Luis Cernuda (Serie El Escritor y la crítica), ed. de D. Harris, Taurus, Madrid, 1977, p. 140. [11] Prosa, 1.11-20. [12] Ibid., p. 1.062. [13] Yeats, p. 347. [14] Ibid., p. 259. [15] Prosa, pp. 1.103-9. [16] Ibid., pp. 1.058-73. [17] Ibid., 1.060-1.

[18] Yeats, p. 205. [19] Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 31. [20] Ibid., p. 25. [21] Prosa, p. 1.119-20. [22] Paz, op. cit., p. 139. [23] Ibid., p. 149. [24] Yeats, p. 259. [25] See Miriam Allott's summary of the main interpretations in her ed. of Keats's Poems, Longman, 1977, p. 5. [26] Poesía, p. 329. [27] Ibid., p. 333. [28] Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 120. [29] Poesía, p. 341. [30] Poesía, p. 162. [31] Ibid., p. 342. [32] Yeats, p. 222. [33] Ibid., p. 223-4. [34] Prosa, p. 1.063. This point is made more forcibly by Rosenthal (op. cit., pp. 116 & 122) when he complains about the non-poetic treatment of Yeats by so many critics.. He specifically alludes to Harold Bloom's handling of the symbolism of A Vision, as it reappears in the poetry, accusing Bloom of dodging the issue by cluttering up his criticism with needless technicalities. See H. Bloom, Yeats, New York, OUP, 1970. Richard Ellmann, in his otherwise valuable Yeats: The Man and the Masks (OUP, 1979: is also occasionally guilty of this irritating spook-hunting. [35] Yeats, p. 245. [36] Ibid., p. 218. [37] Ibid., p. 281. [38] B. Hughes, “Cernuda and the Poetic Imagination: Primeras poesías as Metaphysical Poetry., Anales de Literatura Española, Univ. de Alicante, 1982. [39] Poesía, p. 325. [40] Paz, op. cit., at times gives this impression, but a more serious case is P. Salinas, “Luis Cernuda, poeta” , in Literatura española siglo XX, Alianza, Madrid, 1979. [41] D. Romero de Solís, Poiesis, Madrid, Taurus, 1981, pp. 227-8. [42] Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1974. [43] Poesía, p. 313. [44] P. Silver, Et in Arcadia Ego: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda, Támesis Books, London, 1965, passim. [45] Paz, Los hijos del limo, p. 155. [46] Ocnos,”El acorde”, Prosa, P. 104. [47] Paz, Hijos del limo, pp. 147-8. [48] Paz, Taurus, p. 146. [49] Derek Harris: Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry, Támesis Books, Londos, 1973, pp. 119-20. [50] Ibid., p. 134. [51] Poesía, p. 343. [52] Paz, Taurus, p. 154. [53] Harris, Study, p. 101. [54] Ibid., He quotes from Prosa, p. 965. [55] Martínez Nadal (op. cit., pp. 231-33) identifies the original of Cernuda's “Arcángel”. [56] Yeats, p. 118. [57] Ibid., p. 234.

[58] Poesía, p. 280. [59] Paz, Taurus, p. 127. [60] Poesía, p. 280. [61] Paz, Taurus, p. 141. [62] Yeats, p. 234. [63] Ibid. [64] Ibid., p. 230. [65] Poesía, p. 283. [66] Yeats, p. 333. [67] Poesía, p. 336. [68] Silver, op. cit., p. 151. [69] Ibid., p. 338. [70] Poesía, p. 361. [71] Ibid., p. 373. [72] J. Olivio Jiménez, “Emoción y trascendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Cernuda”. La Caña Gris, Valencia, 6-8, otoño 1962, p. 81. [73] Silver, op. cit., p. 158. [74] Prosa, p. 807. [75] Yeats, p. 52. [76] Ibid., p. 218. [77] Ibid., p. 221. [78] Poesía, p. 403. [79] Poesía, p. 485. [80] Yeats, pp. 156-7. [81] See Poesías, p. 921, N., for date. [82] Ibid., p. 493. [83] Ibid., p. 332. [84] Yeats, p. 182. [85] Ibid. [86] Poesía, pp. 417-8. [87] Pound's Letters, nº 60; quoted Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, Faber, London, 1967, p. 286. [88] Paz, Taurus, p. 146. [89] Prosa, pp. 1.062-3. [90] Paz, Taurus, p. 141. [91] Ibid. [92] Paz, Los hijos del limo, pp. 121, ff. [93] Paz, Taurus, p. 144. [94] Cf. Rosenthal's remark: “Again and again, an essential antithesis emerges in Yeat's poetry between the complexity of his speaker's whole consciousness and Yeats's own desire to strip the language down to the most direct expression possible of a private state of feeling. Romantic poetry began the modern movement toward this kind of antithesis”. (Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 127). [95] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 359, n. 143. [96] Poesía, p. 448. [97] Ibid., p. 318. [98] Yeats, p. 148. [99] Ibid., p. 211.

[100] J. Olivio Jiménez, “Emoción y transcendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Luis Cernuda“, La Caña Gris, nos. 6-8, Valencia, 1962, p. 61 [101] Poesía, p. 337 [102] Harris, Study, passim. [103] Poesía, p. 368. [104] Ibid., pp. 225-6. See Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 26-7, for details of the death of Iñaki Sobrino, which gave rise to the poem. [105] Yeats, “An Introduction for My Plays” , in Essays and Introductions, London, MacMillan, 1961, p. 530. Emphasis added. [106] Poesías, p. 308. [107] Yeats, p. 230. [108] Poesías, p. 450.

Chapter 4 Cernuda and Eliot So far, we have argued that Cernuda had begun to adapt to his own language, and for his own purposes, certain conceptions of poetry and methods of composition which he had discovered in a number of English poets, chiefly Browning and Yeats. This influence, we have found, extended to the new way in which he handled certain themes, and even to his use of particular images. We have said that his idea of the poet and of poetry was, at least, modified by his reading of these two poets, and that these influences were cumulative, insofar as Yeats had been influenced, in his turn, by Browning. This pattern is continued, and, in a sense, completed, by the paramount influence of T. S. Eliot: continued, because Eliot sought the aid of both Yeats and Browning, in addition to his fruitful collaboration with the middle link in the chain, Pound, in his great effort to renovate English poetry; and completed, because the Eliot “tone” that creeps into Cernuda's later poetry affects the most crucial area of all: the language. Whether or not it is true, as Williams said, that Eliot's very excellence “set American poetry back twenty years”, it seems abundantly clear that here, in Eliot's new and intensely exciting poetic idiom, Cernuda found what he had been looking for. And yet, we may do him the credit of accepting his statement when he says that he knew what he was looking for[1]. To take one example, the poem “Nocturno yanqui” would not have been possible in its present form without Cernuda's reading of Browning, but it could not even hace been conceived if he had never read Eliot. Equally obviously, he could never have been in a position to appreciate what Eliot was doing if he had not digested the lesson of Manrique. Some explanation of these remarks is clearly in order, and I shall endeavour to be precise. The absence of critical support notwithstanding, others besides myself have surely noticed the oddity, not of the content, but of the title, of Cernuda's brilliant critical essay, “Tres poetas metafísicos”[2]. This essay was written in 1946, significantly close to the publication of Four Quartets, and it reveals some debt to T. S. Eliot's critical scheme, in particular to his call for a re-estimate of the work of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, etc. Moreover, outside Cernuda's own criticism, there is no recognised “metaphysical” tradition in Spanish poetry, and, but for Eliot, it is doubtful whether the English tradition that goes by that name, reconstructed out of Johnson's none too favourable comments, would have possessed anything like its present prestige. A bold stroke, therefore, of Cernuda's. But it is when one examines the critical remarks in the essay that one begins to see most clearly the parallels with Cernuda's reading of one English critical tradition, which he greatly admired, and by which he is judging Spanish poetic practice. This is dangerous, but it is also fascinating when it leads to this sort of judgement: Manrique ( ... ) representa una forma estilística para la cual la palabra es sobre todo revelación directa de un pensamiento, sin complacerse, como ya se complace Garcilaso, en las asociaciones que la imaginación puede efectuar con la palabra, prescindiendo de su significación inmediata.[3]

Cernuda sees in Manrique both a stark identification of object and concept and a direct sensuous apprehension of this reality in language, which is thus free of the conscious cunning it acquires with the more complex world view that characterises the Renaissance. One consequence of this, in Manrique, and, one may add, in a large number of other late medieval poets, is the arresting, indeed the petrifying immediacy to them of the idea of death. “Idea” is, in fact, the wrong word: the thought of death to them is a devastating, virtually physical experience, and it is this impact that Cernuda is striving to grasp in the following observations, rather than the quietist acceptance of death that they might seem to advocate when read out of context: La muerte no es algo distinto de la vida, es parte integrante de ella, cuya perfección misma se logra en la muerte, sin la cual la vida no tendría más sentido que un ocioso juego de luces y sombras. De la intención que el hombre ponga en sus actos, al referir intenciones y actos a la muerte, nace su inmortalidad ante la fama, su resurrección impersonal en el pensarniento de las generaciones. Esto no supone una negación de la vida, a la que inevitablernente llevaría la concepción cristiana exclusiva de nuestra existencia; es sólo una serena afirmación de ella, no disuadiendo, sino estimulando a la acción temporal humana.[4]

However, Cernuda is evidently tailoring his account of the three Spanish poets concerned to suit his own idea of what they might have been about, and the lessons that might be learned from them. He is inventing a Spanish metaphysical line of which he proposes to be the latest exponent. In contrast to Eliot's position, Cernuda's tradition has been spawned without any clear proof of pedigree. Johnson, in his famous essay, held that the school was characterised by its tendency to “yoke by violence together” ideas that ought to be held apart; Eliot in his more indirect way, felt that the metaphysicals were like Donne, to whom “a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.”[5] Cernuda, with a marked tendency to read much newer ideas into older poetry, seems to conceive Metaphysical poetry as a species of postHegelian, or post-Heideggerian[6] state of grace, in which word and concept meet and marry, in a harmony that is also a revelation, or what Heidegger called an “uncovering”: La poesía pretende infundir relativa permanencia en lo efímero; pero hay cierta forma de lirismo, no bien reconocida ni apreciada entre nosotros, que atiende con preferencia lo que en la vida humana, por dignidad y excelencia, parece imagen de una inmutable realidad superior. Dicho lirismo, al que en rigor puede llamársele metafísico, no requieree expresión abstracta, ni supone necesariamente en el poeta algún sistema filosófico previo, sino que basta con que deje presentir, dentro de una obra poética, esa correlación entre las dos realidades, visible e invisible del mundo.[7]

These ideas are a modification of the account of poetry given in “Palabras antes de una lectura”[8], incorporating the metaphysical idea, but leaving the scheme largely intact. It is, therefore, difficult to escape the conclusion that he read the notion of “Metaphysical poetry”, probably suggested by reading Eliot on the subject, into the work of Aldana, Manrique and the anonymous author of the “Epístola moral a Fabio”, and, at the same time, coloured this notion with his own thoughts of what poetry does, or ought to do. The three poets por caminos distintos llegan a esta equivalente solución: la fantasmagoría que nos cierne, conforme al testimonio de los sentidos, sólo adquiere significación al ser referida a una vislumbre interior del mundo suprasensible.[9]

“Nocturno yanqui”, which Luis Maristany numbers among Cernuda's best poems “dentro de esta línea moral o meditativa”[10], reveals a mastery of the interior monologue in the second person –an awkward description, granted; but this is not self-address– which has been very

conveniently clarified by Jaime Gil de Biedma. In his terms, the voice of the poet addressing his private self is the means by which the gap between “hijo de Dios” and “hijo de vecino” is bridged[11], and, though we know from the details and private circumstances of the life that is revealed that the “tú” addressed is Luis Cernuda, we cannot avoid the sensation that it is also somehow each one of us, “hypocrite lecteur”, “hermano mío”: “Lo mejor que has sido, diste, Lo mejor de tu existencia, A una sombra: Al afán de hacerte digno, Al deseo de excederte, Esperando Siempre mañana otro día Que, aunque tarde, justifique Tu pretexto.”[12]

The relevant term here is Eliot's “impersonality”, and one's conviction that Cernuda learned something of the technique from Eliot is strengthened both by a comparison with Cernuda's earlier erratic use of the “tú” (resulting in an intrusion of the poet's personality) and by the readiness with which he quotes Eliot's formula: the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind that creates. [13]

Interestingly, Helen Gardner has discussed Eliot's similar use in Four Quartets of what we might call this impersonal second person, as well as the peculiar use of the personal pronouns generally. Indeed, if we feel that Cernuda's “tú” is occasionally somewhat confusing (e.g. in passages of “Poemas para un cuerpo”, or the elegy on Gide) we might well exercise charity, reminding ourselves with Helen Gardner that such awkwardness arises not from faulty technique but from the difficulty of the enterprise. As she puts it: “The difficulty of communication is reflected in the uncertain use of the personal pronouns.”[14]

It is also noteworthy that “Nocturno yanqui”, as can be seen from the stanza we have quoted, is written in the form of “coplas de pie quebrado”: this meditation on time and death has clear affinities with Manrique's “Coplas”, and Cernuda encourages the reader to make the comparison by reviving the famous form. Thus, if we are correct in our assumption that Cernuda associated Metaphysical poetry with both Eliot and Manrique, then here is further ground for seeing “Nocturno yanqui” as, at least partly, an Eliot-inspired poem. C. P. Otero has made the parallel with Hugh Kenner's description of Eliot as “the invisible poet” in his pugnacious, and occasionally virulent, essay on Cernuda, “Poeta de Europa”. He makes the telling point that Cernuda's mature style achieves that balance of speech rhythm and verse cadence which is so fundamental to modern poetry, and which, by controlling the flow of the thought, allows the poet to speak naturally and. at the same time, to get the maximum intensity, compactness and accuracy into the words he selects: EI tono cernudiano sabe adecuarse a la ocasión, sin estridencias ni engolamientos. Y no por eso la voz deja de ser la más distinta y timbrada de la poesía española moderna, ni su dicción la más personal, depurada y mesurada. Al menos yo no sé de poeta español moderno que versifique con más gracia, de ninguno que tenga más registros o procure más sutil halago verbal, más afortunado en sacar chispas metafísicas a la expresión más llana; de ninguno con más desnudez y

reticencia, más ajeno a toda barata bisutería metafórica. Nadie, en fin, que haya sin copado más sutilmente la confluencia rítmica del verso y de la frase, técnica tan necesaria en el monólogo dramático.[15]

Otero's closing phrase points back to Browning, but in the context it is clear that he is thinking more of Yeats and Eliot as precursors of Cernuda in this regard. Indeed, Eliot is the name most commonly mentioned by those commentators of Cernuda's poetry who consider the question of English influences at all. This seems to be fair in a general sense: there are more echoes of Eliot than of any other single English poet in Cernuda's work, both in poetry and criticism. There is even an intermittent tendency in his critical writings to adopt a certain disdainful smartness of tone, or to fly in the face of common sense and common experience in his judgements, as occasionally happens in Eliot. To take an example, when all allowances have been made for the importance of Campoamor as a crucial poet of transition, Cernuda's high regard for him is surely excessive. His opinion of Jiménez, too, must be held partly responsible for the testy and ill-considered remark of Gil de Biedma: “Y si a uno no le gustan sus poemas (de J. R. J.) será por cualquier otra razón. A mí, por ejemplo, porque la mayoría de ellos me parecen bobos.”[16] The tendency to conduct and excite polemics is one of the less endearing aspects of Cernuda's public personality, and the readiness of what we may call his school (Gil de Biedma, Otero, Juan Goytisolo, etc.) to take up the cudgels ojhis behalf, or their own, occasionally mars the effect of their penetrating and enlightening studies. One is reminded of Paz's intelligent and perceptive remark that Cernuda was influenced by Eliot's tone and style in his critical writings on Spanish poetry, and that Cernuda writes “con esa precisión y objetividad, no exenta de capricho, que es uno de los encantos y peligros del estilo crítico de Eliot.”[17]

Before we turn to the particular form of Eliot's influence on Cernuda, it will be helpful, as we have done in the cases of Browning and Yeats, to examine Cernuda's own opinions of the work of the Anglo-American poet in order to get a perspective on the features of this work which Cernuda thought to be most original. In this way, it is hoped, the notion of “influence” will become less diffuse, and the traces left on Cernuda's work by Eliot's will be highlighted and thus more readily detectable. The first thing that must be said, in this regard, is that, despite Cernuda's admiration for Eliot, and the frequency with which he quotes him or refers to him, he wrote only one article of any length on the subject, and it is a negative one. We shall return to this article shortly. But before we do so, we shall attempt a brief summary of Cernuda's other remarks on Eliot, remarks chiefly made in passing. There is no doubt whatsoever that Cernuda was fully convinced of the immense stature of Eliot. He claims to have been struck by him when he read “The Waste Land”, as a young man[18]. Though it is quite possible that he might have seen a translation in the twenties or early thirties, there is no evidence that I can find in his own poetry to suggest the impact this reading is supposed to have made on him. Hence, the experience, unless Cernuda is

confusing dates and places, or extending the usual idea of a “young man” to include a person well into his thirties, must have lain dormant in him until exile took him to Britain, and a deep and careful reading of the English poets. By the mid fifties[19], Cernuda could write of his deep admiration for Eliot and the other English poet/critics (Dryden, Johnson, Arnold, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.) adding a typical complaint about the want of such a tradition in Spain[20]. In an interview with the journalist, Jaime Tello, in Cambridge in 1945, Cernuda made the following somewhat general and conventional statement: Creo que Eliot es sin duda el más grande de todos (los poetas ingleses actuales) y uno de los grandes poetas del mundo. Especialmente su última obra, Cuatro Cuartetos (“Four Quartets”) es de una trascendencia extraordinaria y es en ella donde Eliot se ha logrado mejor desde el punto de vista del lenguaje. ¡Qué lenguaje más rico! ¡Qué exactitud y qué precisión en el concepto![21]

At the very end of his life, and in much the same vein, he describes Eliot as “Un artista consciente en extremo de las posibilidades de su arte y sus límites”, adding once again that Spanish artists are temperamentally not selfconscious[22]. For more precise detail of the reasons for his admiration of Eliot, we must look to two critical essays in which Cernuda relies on critical perceptions of Eliot's. One of these essays deals with Salinas and Gui11én, and the other is on Matthew Arnold. In the first, Cernuda takes Salinas to task for his superficiality, his mere verbal ingenuity, and charges that, though Salinas is right to see Baudelaire as a modern poet, he (Salinas) himself fails to be modern precisely because he does not treat his art seriously. Cernuda now quotes, in his translation, from Eliot's essay on Baudelaire, which I give in the original English: It is not merely in the use of imagery of common fife, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid fife of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity –presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself– that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men.[23]

In addition to the importance of this idea for Cernuda's later theory of poetry, the reader of Eliot and Cernuda will perhaps be no less struck by the point at which Cernuda stops his quotation of Eliot; for Eliot goes on to claim that Baudelaire was more than just a stylistic innovator, that in Baudelaire's Romanticism there lurked an element of moral renewal, at least as important for the future of poetry as his courageously individual use of specifically urban, and specifically sordid, imagery: “Baudelaire”, Eliot tells us, “is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards fife is no less radical and no less important. In his verse, he is now less a model to be imitated or a source to be drained than a reminder of the duty, the consecrated task of sincerity ( ... ) Many of his poems are insufficiently removed from their Romantic origins, from Byronic paternity and Satanic fraternity. The “satanism” of the Black Mass was very much in the air; in exhibiting it Baudelaire is the voice of his time; but I would observe that in Baudelaire, as in no-one else, it is redeemed by meaning something else (...) Huysmans me rely provides a document. Baudelaire would not even provide that, if he had been really absorbed in that ridiculous hocus-pocus. But actually Baudelaire was concerned, not with demons, black masses and romantic blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil.[24]

There are two points to be borne in mind here. In the first place, there is a very real possibility of tendentiousness on Eliot's part, in wishing to make Baudelaire –the very type

and exemplar of the conscious modern poet– a spokesman for the view that the more extreme forms of Romanticism are trite, or base, and that the real concern is with the sense of sin and the possibility of redemption. Each reader must make up his own mind, but, as we shall see, there are reasons to believe that Cernuda had no wish to follow Eliot, or anyone else, in this direction. Secondly, we have already mentioned Cernuda's own rather facile satanism in Las nubes and earlier. Though this aspect of his poetry has its champions[25], it seems to disappear around the mid-forties, and it is quite possible that he was so mortified by Eliot's explicit condemnation of such manifestations that he preferred to draw a veil over his own participation in them. This would not imply, of course, an acceptance of Eliot's own stiffly Christian views, but a recognition, perhaps. on Cernuda's part, of a past error of taste. In the second essay which concerns us here, that on Matthew Arnold, Cernuda seems to follow Eliot in classifying Arnold as “Un crítico que escribió poesía” rather than as a poet/critic, and he specifically quotes Eliot as saying that Arnold was not interested in the creative process itself: Adivinamos que el escribir poesía apenas le produjo esa excitación, esa gozosa pérdida de si en la artesanía del arte, ese alivio intenso y transitorio que ocurre al momento de la compleción (SIC) y que es la recompensa principal del trabajo creador .[26]

We are naturally more interested in the fact that Cernuda judges Arnold by Eliot's yardstick, than in his opinion of the value, or the nature, of Arnold's poetry. The selflessness and buoyancy briefly experienced in the creative process clearly appealed to Cernuda as the positive counterpart of the poet's essential solitude. This ties in with the views of Derek Harris (on selflessness) and Philip Silver (on solitude), but points away from their respective preoccupations with psychological and philosophical speculations, and towards Yeats's central concern with the moment of communication of the artist with the dead and the yet unborn, i.e. towards aesthetic transcendence of the finite. If one recalls that Yeats was, for Eliot, the greatest living poet, one begins to see the source of Cernuda's interest in Eliot's conception of inspiration. A glance back at Eliot's essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Function of Criticism” reminds us that his approach to these issues is much more cautious and pragmatic than Yeats's. In these two seminal essays, Eliot attempts to anchor the notion of tradition in the mind of an exceptionally talented individual poet, and to rationalise (i.e. demystify) the creative process in the famous formula of the objective correlative, a notion Cernuda once or twice avails himself of in his criticism, though generally without acknowledging his source.[27] Eliot's famous definition of the objective correlative has become a catch-phrase by this time, and there is probably little point in attempting to rescue it from the morass of misuse and overuse in which it is sunk. Nevertheless, if we are no longer, perhaps, quite sure what the phrase originally meant, it is reasonably easy to be sure what it did not mean. Harris's application of it to Cernuda's surrealist phase seems misguided and extraordinarily muddled in an essay which, though sticking obstinately to psychological interpretation, is characteristically moderate and sensible. If we are to have a clear idea of Eliot's influence on

Cernuda, it is essential to see that Cernuda's use of Eliot's terms thirty years après coup (as Harris acknowledges[28]) implies nothing whatsoever about Cernuda's understanding of his art at the time he wrote the poems. Besides, what Eliot actually wrote was this: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative” ; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.[29]

Thus, when Harris writes of “the technique of free association, of the objective correlative, which Cernuda learnt from surrealism”, he seems to be making a number of blunders. In the first place, the objective correlative is not a technique, but a required skill (“the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art”). Secondly, it is just the opposite of free association: Eliot is adamant that it involves a deliberate choice which “(shall be the formula” of the emotion, that the facts must terminate in sensory experience, and that the emotion is “immediately evoked”. No question, then, of freedom. Thirdly, as is already implicit in our first objection, Cernuda can hardly have “learned” this technique from surrealism, since Eliot states that it is a condition of all art. Indeed, Eliot formulated the notion in an effort to explain what, to him, is the failure of Hamlet. For some reason, Harris links his remarks on the objective correlative with a remark of Eliot's from a very different source: In some minds, certain memories, both from reading and from life, become charged with emotional significance. All these are used, so that intensity is gained at the expense of clarity.[30]

No doubt, such emotionally charged memories may constitute an objective correlative, but Eliot's emphasis in this case is on the intensity of the emotion. Harris twice (pp. 36 and 40) takes the gaining of intensity at the expense of clarity as an aim, rather than an effect, of compression. This looks like a misunderstanding of the phrase “so thato, which Harris presumably takes to introduce a final clause, rather than an adverbial clause of consequence (“with the result that”), which latter is obviously meant. There can be no point in deliberately sacrificing clarity: Eliot must mean that, in certain circumstances, some clarity has to be sacrificed for the sake of intensity. In a passage in Historial, Cernuda takes up Eliot's idea much more in the latter's spirit: Quería yo hallar en poesía el “equivalente correlativo” para lo que experimentaba, por ejemplo, al ver a una criatura hermosa ( ... ) o al oír un aire de jazz. Ambas experiencias, de la vista y del oído, se elevaban en mí misteriosamente a fuerza de intensidad, y ya comenzaba a entrever que una manera de satisfacerlas, exorcizándolas, sería la de darles expresión ( ... ) Al lector que considere inadecuado a mi experiencia su resultado emotivo, y frívolo éste además al tratarse solo ( ... ) de una experiencia consistente en oír un aire de jazz, le recordaré aquellas palabras de Rimbaud, cuyo sentido creo posible comparar al de mi experiencia: “Un título de vaudeville erguía espantos ante mí”.[31]

He might have reminded us instead of the words of Eliot, a few lines after the definition of the objective correlative: The artistic inevitability lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the

face of his artistic problem.[32]

There are, therefore, two emotions, or rather two states of the same emotion: an emotion experienced by the poet (a beautiful child, a haunting melody) and this emotion transmuted into the form of art. Eliot's point, which Cernuda perhaps grasps only imperfectly, is that there are emotions which cannot be expressed, though they can be experienced. Since this has a direct bearing on Eliot's doctrine of impersonality, I shall risk trying the reader's patience by returning to some remarks of Eliot's in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality ( ... ) it is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life ( ... ) The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but un escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.[33]

It is, of course, extremely difficult to say how far this brilliant exposition could be carried out in practice. Though it is clear that Eliot was more faithful to his principles in The Waste Land than in Four Quartets, one cannot be so sure that The Waste Land is not, in places, “a turning loose of emotion”, occasionally of a perverse or unpleasant kind (e.g., the pub scene in “A Game of Chess” or the seduction of the secretary in “The Fire Sermon”). And Pound's deletions got rid not only of clutter, but of some incidental detail which revealed the unhealthy state of Eliot's mind at the time of composing. The brilliance of Eliot's theoretical statements may very well have dazzled Cernuda; he was certainly impressed enough, as we have seen, to recall the main lines, even some of the expressions, when he was writing Historial. But it is doubtful whether he made any alteration in his method of composition as a direct result of Eliot's theories. Eliot was much more important to him as a practitioner than as a theoretician, as we shall see in due course. The American critic, Alexander Coleman, holds that Cernuda's poetry after 1936 is strongly influenced by Hölderlin, and he stresses the intensification of Cernuda's “elegiac... trait” and the recurrent vision of harmony –between man and nature, man and the gods– as being central to the middle and later period, and learnt from Hölderlin. At the same time, Coleman detects, quite rightly, a “more objectified expression” and “more disciplined mastery over the resources of language, a calm and impassive poetic voice, a new dramatisation of situations.”[34] Later, he discusses the technique of self-address, to which we referred earlier, and he quotes, in support, from Eliot's essay, “The Three Voices of Poetry”. The suggestion seems to be either that Cernuda followed Eliot's theory in his own later practice, or that he came at the technique himself, in an attempt, like Eliot, to escape from the tyranny of personality, by projecting the self on to objects or creating new selves. The problem, however, is that it is very difficult to see how Hölderlin would have been of help in such an endeavour. Nobody would deny the importance of Hölderlin's influence, but one may question the total view of Cernuda's later poetry as an amalgam of subjective

Romantic longing, in the manner of Hölderlin, and impersonal Modernist ironic or dramatic lyrics, in the manner of Eliot. One would seem to exclude the other. Perhaps a more satisfactory way of putting it would be to say that Hölderlin provided the mythology and the ideology, while the Modernist influences tended to help polish the already considerable technique. That the tecnique was polished there is no doubt. Coleman holds that Cernuda's “dramatic projections” of himself create “a dramatic monologue which is almost theatrical in its intensity”[35]. Whatever this last phrase may mean, one would certainly agree that the dramatic effect is considerable. As we have tried to show, this occurs most notably under the influence of Browning or Yeats. But then one realises that Coleman is speaking, not of the poems of Como quien espera el alba or Con las horas contadas, but of Invocaciones. This is very interesting, as Jaime Gil de Biedma has said the very same thing: en Invocaciones, bastante antes de que Cernuda hubiera leído a Browning, encontramos dos espléndidos monólogos dramáticos: “Soliloquio del farero” y “La gloria del poeta”.[36]

This critic goes on to say that, for Robert Langbaum[37], the dramatic monologue is merely a specific variant of the poetry of experience, and has been, since the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most genuine and characteristic form of modem poetry. That Cernuda should have adopted it early in his career is, therefore, quite consistent, and even natural. In theory, this sounds perfectly reasonable. The trouble is that neither of the poems Gil de Biedma mentions is a dramatic monologue in any very obvious sense: there is no development of the character, and, except for the convention of the first person form, nothing to distinguish the voice of the speaker from the poet's own voice. Nor is there any drama implicit in the situation: the lighthousekeeper explains, often in a heavy, bombastic way, why he prefers solitude to company. The speaker of “La gloria del poeta” hurls insults at the community of men, at their sordid lives, loveless marriages, greed, hypocrisy and cowardly morality: “Oye sus marmóreos preceptos Sobre lo útil, lo normal y lo hermoso; Óyeles dictar la ley al mundo, acotar el amor, dar canon a [la belleza inexpresable.

As the example perhaps shows, the tone of this poem is closer to rant than to the pitch of excitement often reached in the genuine dramatic monologue. The point surely is that Cernuda was not setting out to write dramatic monologues: the class of poetry to which they are to be assigned is the ode, the poetry of contemplation (and experience, of course) which we find in Wordsworth and Hö1derlin. The fact that the words are put into the mouths of personae is accidental, or, al least, incidental. And –though this is less relevant– they are nowhere near Cernuda's best: Gil de Biedma's “espléndidos” is an obvious exaggeration, no doubt revealing his enthusiastic support for the attitude and the content, rather than the accuracy of his critical judgement. He is much nearer the mark in seeing that the “poetry of experience” is a relevant category

for the poetry written by Pound and Eliot, who reacted against Romanticism, as well as for the Romantics. As he explains: Un poema moderno no consiste en una imitación de la realidad o de un sistema de ideas acerca de la realidad –lo que los clásicos llamaban una imitación de la naturaleza– sino en un simulacro de una experiencia real ( ... ) Se trata de dar al poema una validez objetiva que no está en función de lo que en él se dice, sino de lo que en él está ocurriendo.[38]

In “Soliloquio del farero”, the lighthouse-keeper's experience is not investigated, but stated or explicated. The importance of the figure is symbolic, not dramatic: he represents the poet, the seer, the solitary who observes what happens around him, but does not participate: “Acodado al balcón miro insaciable el oleaje, Oigo sus oscuras imprecaciones, Contemplo sus blancas acaricias; Y erguido desde cuna vigilante, Soy en la noche un diamante que gira advirtiendo a los hombres.”[39] (emphasis added).

This is hardly to be compared with the technique of Cernuda's later poems, of “Nocturno yanqui” or “Tiempo de vivir, tiempo de dormir”, for example, or the title poem of Desolación de la quimera. In this poem, it is not only the title that is borrowed from Eliot[40]. The ironic contrast between the chimera's desperation and the indifferent moon recalls Eliot's semidramatic use of the “lunar synthesis” and the “lunar incantations” which “dissolve the floors of memory” in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: “Su reflejo la luna deslizando Sobre la arena sorda del desierto Entre sombras a la Quimera deja.”[41]

Cernuda's longest essay on Eliot is entitled “Goethe y Mr Eliot”[42] and is concerned with Eliot's lifelong resistance to classifying Goethe among the great writers, as Cernuda would have had him do. It would therefore be peripheral to our main purpose, if it were not for Cernuda's insight into the reasons for Eliot's discomfort with Goethe. Cernuda is surely right in guessing that Eliot's aversion to the German has a religious explanation. The reader of Eliot's essay on Dante is aware that his admiration for the Italian poet is partly conditioned by his admiration of Dante's religion. As Arnold did –though not to Eliot's satisfaction– Eliot took to writing occasional essays on religious subjects. His concern with Christianity became central to his thought from the early twenties, and it is not at all difficult to imagine that he would have been pained and shocked by Goethe's careless atheism, his cheerful godlessness, and that this would have affected Eliot's critical judgements. The mind that could canonise Baudelaire was certainly not above anathematising Goethe. Though it is also probably true that the same qualities in Goethe which offended Eliot would have delighted the rabid pagan there was in Cernuda, he is quite justified in attacking Eliot's narrow-mindedness. And crucially, Cernuda's superior broad-mindedness is borne out by his stated preference, among Eliot's works, for Four Quartets. So many non-Christians, or lapsed Christians, have shown contempt or indifference for this major poem that it is heartening to find someone who is prepared to admire it without necessarily accepting the religious system

on which it is based, and which it largely attempts to vindicate. There is another reason why this marked preference[43] of Cernuda's should concern us here. For all its immense subtlety and magnificent technique, Four Quartets is a much more personal poem than any that Eliot had written before. We are conscious in reading it of a mind attempting to make sense of its experience, of what it feels like to want to believe and not find the words to express what one has to say. Paz, Otero, Gil de Biedma and others have argued that Cernuda was and remained a Romantic; whether or not one agrees with them – and we have attempted to define more strictly the limits of his Romanticism– it is certainly true that he was, like the Romantics, most comfortable when speaking, approximately, in his own voice. He was quite possibly troubled by the dispersion and fragmentation that are such essential features of The Waste Land, though he greatly admired it. Now, in Four Quartets, he found the same marvellous skill with words and images, but accompanied by a unity of tone and sensibility which, though definitely not Romantic, was much closer to his own practice. The danger, as we suggested earlier, is that the poem may sink into prosiness; this does happen intermittently in Four Quartets, and we contend that it very. seriously damages a number of the poems of Desolación. The fact that Gil de Biedma, like Otero, singles out this last volume for special praise perhaps tells us more about his own taste, and his early immersion in the “poesía social” movement, than about Cernuda's poetry. Gil de Biedma points out that Cenuda was always temperamentally a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, and had to struggle hard to keep his feet on the ground: “deliberado esfuerzo que se percibe en su obra y al que ni el temperamento ni la mentalidad del poeta se plegaban con facilidad”. [44] However, the likelihood is that Cernuda, in writing of the effort to overcome a tendency towards “ese tipo de poesía personal y subjetiva”, was thinking of the self-regard of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Rubén Darío in their poetry, and of certain aspects of his own early poetry. He clearly feels he has now overcome the tendency, but, as the essay was written in 1958, the probability is that he is reasonably satisfied that his poetry of the forties and fifties is free of this fault. Since Desolación de la quimera was written, after a long period of inactivity, in 1960 and 1961, he cannot be speaking, in Historial, of his last phase.[45] One of Eliot's best critics, Helen Gardner, has written trenchantly of the return, after The Waste Land, to a more intimate and directly personal tone in his poetry, which has a very direct bearing on the matter we are discussing here. She writes: The natural world, which is not looked at directly, has a beauty it did not have in his earlier contemplation of it. Instead of looking out upon the world and seeing sharply defined and various manifestations of the same desolation and emptiness, the poet turns away from the outer world of men to ponder over certain intimate personal experiences. He narrows the range of his vision, withdraws into his own mind, and “thus devoted, concentrated in purpose” his verse moves “into another intensity”. The intensity of apprehension in the earlier poetry is replaced by an intensity of meditation.[46]

Whether or not this represented a backward step or an admission of a kind of defeat by Eliot cannot be discussed here. In passing, it is perhaps worth remembering that Yeats saw the

moment of poetic truth as a moment of radiance that was also desolation, and that Pound, who persisted, ends with the wry admission, “I cannot make it cohere”. Eliot sought coherence both in a more traditional style of poetry and in acceptance of a difficult and highly traditional religious code. It is this acceptance that justifies José Angel Valente's statement, partly based on Martz's contentions in The Poetry of Meditation[47], that the line of such poetry arises with the devotional meditations prevalent at the time of the CounterReformation: Los supuestos del arte poético siguen siendo esencialmente los mismos en todos los poetas alineados en la gran tradición de la poesía meditativa occidental: Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, E. Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke (…)[48]

It would not have been possible to include Eliot's name in this list if he had not written “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets. Equally, it would not make much sense to exclude the Metaphysicals, and Valente, though he does not specifically name them here, makes it clear that they are key figures in this scheme of Western poetry. Indeed, lest there should be any doubt that he means “western” and not “northern”, Valente follows Martz in making the Frenchman, Saint François de Sales, and the Spanish devotional writers Loyola and Fray Luis de Granada, the inspirers of the English Metaphysicals.[49] For Cernuda, then, Eliot was principally an extremely highly gifted exponent of a tradition he came more and more to admire, and it is when Eliot is most traditional that Cernuda most admires him. One begins to see why, for Cernuda, Pound lay slightly off the main track: his methods must have seemed ultimately incoherent to a Spaniard nudged towards the great English tradition by the example of Unamuno. It is as a stylist, a master of phrase and rhythm, that Cernuda sees Eliot. As we have seen at several points of our discussion, Cernuda was given to repeating or adapting other poets' verses or tricks of style in his own poetry, but he does so chiefly as a reinforcement of his own words. There is nothing of the allusive technique so dear to Eliot and Pound. Martínez Nadal's explanation of this phenomenon in Cernuda is, to say the least, dubious. Writing of Donde habite el olvido, this critic notes that el poemario está salpicado de claras alusiones cultas, de evocaciones clásicas y románticas; en ciertos quiebros del verso nos parece descubrir a veces intencionados recuerdos-homenaje a algunos de sus poetas amigos.[50]

The same critic refers several times in the same chapter to Cernuda's conscious borrowings and brief acts of homage to predecessors, in a way that sounds a trifle naive. When Eliot and Pound do this sort of thing, it is a way of alerting the reader: we are given a clue as to how the experience in question is to be interpreted, and the allusions, if they are not too obscure, orient us in our reading of the new poem. In Cernuda, the case is different. One is often conscious of the fascination words held for him, and there was clearly something of the collector of quotes, even the name-dropper, in him. At other times, the echoes may even be unconscious (some of the Shakespearean adaptations strike one in this way, and there is a faint echo of the tone of Donne in a number of the poems in the sequence “Poemas para un cuerpo”).[51] However, the echoes of Eliot are so numerous that one cannot be satisfied with an

explanation of this sort. They are neither elegant compliments, nor unconscious or halfconscious recollections of admired lines read once and committed to the limbo of memory. We are dealing almost certainly with deliberate adaptations of ideas and expressions which had made a vivid impression on Cernuda. Most such expressions reveal that felicitous blend of sharp image and natural speech which were central to Eliot's conception of poetry, and which constituted for Cermida the greatest virtue of the English tradition. It is noteworthy that the greatest concentration of these adaptations occurs in the middle and late volumes, Como quien espera el alba (1941-44), Vivir sin estar viviendo (1944-47) and Con las horas contadas (1950-53), i.e. immediately before, and during and after the writing of Four Quartets, when Eliot's prestige was at its height. Let us examine some of then in detail. In the poem “Apologia pro vita sua”, we come upon the following arresting image: “Si el amor no es un nombre, una experiencia inútil de los [labios (Así los dedos clavan un ala transparente Tras el cristal curioso de algún laboratorio), Yo creo que te he amado.”[52]

The image of the captured butterfly, or insect, pinned by the wing in the case, expresses both the fragility and the cruelty of the experience of love, the part played in it by calculation, egoism and aggresiveness, but also the fascination the experience holds for the human mind. It also expresses a typical fear of Cernuda's, the fear of surrender to possible manipulation. An identical fear, in a different context, produces this very similar image in Eliot's “Prufrock”: “And I have known the eyes already, known them all– The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”[53]

Prufrock's neurosis runs deeper than that given expression in Cernuda's poem. It is not love, but the encroaching daily contact with his fellows that Prufrock fears: the expectation that he should do something, say something or think something. Incidental differences in the composition of the image notwithstanding, Cernuda has borrowed the essential features of Eliot's psychological perception, and used them for his own different ends. In both we note the pinning of the victim, the insect-like struggling and the terror of subjection to the scrutiny of others. Cernuda was obviously struck by Eliot's acuteness of observation, his eye for the telling detail. Next, in “Otros tulipanes amarillos” there is a passage other critics have noticed, which instantly recalls the famous opening of The Waste Land: “Es cruel la primavera joven, precipita Al hombre por el viejo camino de los yerros, Con ramos de cerezo florido lo enajena, Con viento del sur tibio lo extravía.”[54]

Though it is scarcely necessary, we shall set Eliot's lines beside these to facilitate the comparison: “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”[55]

Cernuda's first line is a straight borrowing, but it is interesting to notice a number of other aspects. Both poets end three of their four lines in verbs (participles in Eliot) and Cernuda also follows Eliot in the phrasing, particularly in the first line, where “precipita” is added to an already complete sense period, against the usual run of his practice. The enjambement thus underlines the sense of an external and unwelcome force driving the resisting consciousness –in both poems, consciousness and conscience are implicitly linked– in a direction it would rather ignore. The rhythm is a rhythm of insistence, and the verbs at the line ends serve to stress this sense of being, as it were, pushed about. This is a rare case, in which Cernuda not only picks up an idea of Eliot's, but actually imitates his technique in exploiting it. In fact, though this must be submitted tentatively, one sometimes feels that Cernuda's versification from this period onwards shows a debt to Eliot's, particularly in the move away from endstopped lines, and in the delicacy of the ensuing enjambements.[56] An interesting borrowing of a different kind occurs in “A un poeta futuro”: “No comprendo a los ríos. Con prisa errante pasan Desde la fuente al mar, en ocio atareado, Llenos de su importancia, bien fábril o agrícola; La fuente, que es promesa, el mar sólo, la cumple, El multiforme mar, incierto y sempiterno.”[57]

The obvious reference here is to Eliot's passage in Four Quartets (“The Dry Salvages”, l): “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god –sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce, Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. ………………………………………………………….. The river is within us, the sea is all about us.”[58]

Both poems set up a contrast between river and sea, which is then exploited for symbolic purposes, since they come to represent, respectively, the individual consciousness of time and the generic notion of historical time. In Eliot, this is the central issue; in Cernuda, it is stated in passing: “Todo es cuestión de tiempo en esta vida, Un tiempo cuyo ritmo no se acuerda, Por largo y vasto, al otro pobre ritmo De nuestro tiempo humano corto y débil.”

But, returning to the river, we might take note of a complaint voiced by Ricardo Gullón, to wit that a certain unevenness, which he cannot explain, creeps into Cernuda's poetry of this period:

“Surge una tendencia”, writes Gullón, “a razonar dentro del poema, a plantear debates a espaldas de lo propiamente poético.”[59]

He offers “Góngora” as an example of what he means, and despite the inexplicable popularity of this poem among later critics –Goytisolo, for one[60]– I would accept this. Moreover, Gul1ón's criticism chimes with one or two of the remarks we have already made in this essay. But Gullón next charges that the language also exhibits, though only occasionally, “un tinte demasiado demostrativo”, and he gives as an example what he considers the needless specification of “bien fabril o agrícola”, in the lines quoted above. However, though Gullón is obviously right to draw attention to the prosaic tone of this phrase, we must proceed with caution in analysing the function of this tone in the overall context. I have purposely extended the quotation from “The Dry Salvages” to demonstrate that the same sort of prosaic phrasing is present in Cernuda's source, and in Eliot's poem the prose quality looks deliberate. Helen Gardner has an incisive and characteristically intelligent explanation for it: The first paragraph (of “The Dry Salvages”) presents, in its diction, a mingling of the romantic and the prosaic, both replaced at the close by another way of speech ( ... ) The different elements in the diction present the contrast between man feeling at the mercy of his environment, which he regards with awe, and man mastering his environment, which he regards with calculation. But at the close of the paragraph the rhythm, which had been relaxed, becomes taut and firm. [61]

Perhaps something of the same interplay between tautness and looseness is present in Cernuda's poem, or at least in this stanza, though the resolution in this case is somewhat different. If Eliot's paragraph achieves tautness as the resolution of romance and prose, Cernuda's would seem to achieve a relaxed wit as the resolution of aestheticism and prose. We have mentioned the prose. The aestheticism emerges in Cernuda's favourite fountain symbolism and in his literary borrowing from Eliot, and is especially apparent in the somewhat precious line “El multiforme mar, incierto y sempiterno”, which half-remembers Shakespeare. It is particularly interesting that Cernuda's adjective for the sea, “incierto”, should echo Eliot's more specific “untrustworthy”, and the whole series of negative adjectives he applies to the river: “untamed”, “intractable”, “unhonoured”, “unpropitiated”. “Sempiterno” is a favourite of Cernuda's which, oddly for such an unusual adjective, crops up to resounding effect in Eliot's later (“Little Gidding”) “Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown”. Both men, we see, took pleasure in the physical shape and sound of a word. A word should be said, no doubt, on the expression “relaxed wit” in the foregoing remarks, since “A un poeta futuro” is not what one might term a witty poem. We are here referring to the wordplay evident in Cernuda's poem, though the colloquial vocative, “mi imposible amigo”, closes the stanza on a note of expansive and unusually self-deprecating irony. The phrase oen un sueño sin sueños” removes some of the solemnity from the conscious aestheticism of the preceding lines, especially if one considers the accumulative sense the word “sueño” acquires in Cernuda's poetry; and it is picked up in the closing line, where “sueña tu sueño” cleverly maintains the mood of relaxation without losing sight of the artistic

destiny of the future poet. The quasi-pun “seres que serán”, in the immediately preceding line, serves much the same purpose in a poem the essential tone of which is ironic -not sarcastic- resignation. The same tone attaches to Eliot's “Not fare well/But fare forward, travellers.” Reminiscences of Eliot crop up in poem after poem of Como quien espera el alba, in style, tone and expression, with the result that the English-speaking reader has, to a great degree in this volume, the additional aesthetic pleasure of recognition–“additional”, not only in the sense of superadded, but somewhat in opposition to the perhaps too hastily established consensus of critical opinion that this volume is heavy, neo-classical and dull (a view most obviously put about by Paz, Gullón and Tomás Segovia[62]). However, one is naturally less concerned with this or that reference to another author than with the sort of hint that Cernuda may have picked up in his reading and then applied to his own poetry. He was clearly not to learn, purely and simply, how English poets achieved their effects, but was destined, in his particular circumstances, to effect the contact with a larger European tradition, from which Spanish poetry was, for many reasons, divorced. Unamuno had shown the way[63], and though events in Spain, and his own individual obsessions, had prevented him from moving as far as he would, perhaps, have liked towards full European identity, his successor, Cernuda, early saw the importance of the Basque poet's example. I do not, of course, wish to be tendentious: it is not that the English experience was necessary either to Cernuda or to Unamuno. In fact, of the poets with whom Cernuda became, as it were, involved, only Browning, of the moderns, was English. The renovation of English poetry was effected by the Irishman Yeats and by the two Americans –insofar as nationality, in their case, is a relevant category– Eliot and Pound. (Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that very little of the outstanding poetry in English this century has been written by Englishmen.) All three of them insisted on the cultivation of a tradition which, though French and English in immediate origin, defied merely French and English models in its ultimate derivations. As a Spaniard, Cernuda had already ventured fairly far afield in opting for English models in his efforts to renovate a poetry which had for centuries, as he is never tired of repeating, been francophile. One galling experience came when Eliot, acting in his capacity as criticinresidence at Faber & Faber, turned down the translations of certain poems of his, refusing to publish the English version of “Lázaro”, “Cementerio en la ciudad” and “Impresion de destierro”[64]. For once in his life, Cernuda did not allow personal considerations to stand in the way of impartial admission of the quality and importance of an author. It may be felt that in his essay on Eliot and Goethe, Cernuda got something of his own back on the AngloAmerican, but in his purely professional judgements of Eliot's worth, he was strictly fair, and in his own poetry, he took full advantage of his close knowledge of Eliot's work. We have already mentioned “Río vespertino” as an example of Cernuda's best work. It is hardly an accident that it is also an example of his poetry at its most inclusive. (We refrain, for the stated reasons, from using the term –allusive–, which would imply an orientation

when probably no more than a suggestion is intended.) Two separate Eliot references are to be found in this poem. The first concerns the function of the poet. The discipline necessary to the craft of verse requires concentration and solitude –a received idea in the Spanish tradition, stretching back to Fray Luis de Leon and beyond– but also, in Cernuda's particular conception, a raptness and a vibrancy, here represented emblematically by the sweet song of the blackbird at evening: “Está todo abstraído en una pausa De silencio y quietud. Tan solo un mirlo Estremece con el canto la tarde.”[65]

But, as we saw in “Soliloquio del farero”, the poet, in standing aside from the confusion, hubbub and imprecision of day-to-day events and common experiences, comes closer to the heart of the other reality. He is the conscience and the consciousness of man. The possibly elitist attitude thus implied is specifically condemned in a phrase which, echoing Wordsworth, opposes to the idea of the “pure” poet the more robust conception of a man speaking to men, or, more properly, for men: “Su destino es más puro que el del hombre Que para el hombre canta, pretendiendo Ser voz significante de la grey, La conciencia insistente en esa huida De las almas.”[66]

There is no doubt that Cernuda knew the poetry of Mallarme well, and, as we have said, there is evidence to support this view in his earliest work, as Terence McMullan has shown[67]. This is clear in the third line quoted, which is Cernuda's version of Mallarmé's famous statement of the poet's task: Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”.

Equally clearly, Eliot's concern with language, especially in Four Quartets, was one of the features that especially interested Cernuda, who would naturally have recognised the verse from Mallarmé in the words of Eliot's “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding”: “Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe...”[68]

In passing, it is interesting to note the explicit social function attributed to poetry by all three writers. Yet all three exhibit a fastidiousness bordering on disdain, in the term used to designate their fellow creatures. In Eliot and Mallarmé, the word is tribe, an unflattering reference to the general want of culture. In Cernuda, it is the even more contemptuous “grey” which implies not only a prevalent barbarousness, but a complete lack of personality, attributable to stupidity. Though he reacts against the elitism or egocentricity of Guillén, Salinas, etc., Cernuda cannot overcome an aristocratic attitude of contempt for the “profane vulgar”, even when accepting that his task is to improve them. However, the wrestle with words and meanings is the paramount issue, and the fact that Cernuda follows Eliot (“Little Gidding” was published separately in 1942; “Río vespertino”

was written in 1944), who followed Mallarmé in seeing this, is a demonstration of the justness of the sense of tradition which Cernuda came to share with Eliot, and of the lines in Four Quartets: And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to [conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot [hope To emulate –but there is no competition– There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again; and now under [conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our [business.[69]

If Cernuda found, in Yeats and Hölderlin, confirmation of certain of his own convictions regarding the high place of the poet in the world of men, and the crucial importance of the creative experience for insight into the nature of reality, it was Eliot more than anyone else who showed him that precision of language was the only way such experience could be communicated. His own tendency to inflation and verbosity, which he admits was perhaps something he never fully eliminated[70], diminishes notably in his best poetry from about 1940 onwards. His criticism of Spanish poetry in “Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea”, written in the early and mid fifties, is almost exclusively concerned with style and language. In his essay on Machado, he quotes a conversation between Mallarmé and Degas. Degas complained that, though he had plenty of ideas, he could not find words to express them in poetry, to which Mallarmé replied that poems are not written with ideas, but with words [71]. The second Eliot reference detectable in “Río vespertino”, comes at the end of the poem, in “ el tiempo sin tiempo”, which is the moment of illumination when expe rience and meaning coincide. That this is identical to what Eliot calls “the moment in and out of time”[72] is confimed by the unmistakable Eliot resonance of the closing lines: “El viento fantasmal entre los olmos Las hojas idas mueve y las futuras. Está dormido el mirlo. Las estrellas No descienden al agua todavía.”[73]

These lines read like a conflation of passages in “Burnt Norton” concerned with past and future: in particular the third section, the famous scene in the London tube, which opens: “Here is a place of disaffection Time before and time after In a dim light.”[74]

Later in the same passage occurs the phrase “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time.

Allowing for the differences of situation, and for the fact that, while Eliot's poem is presentative, Cernuda's is meditative, the essential idea ís the same, and Cernuda's verbal debt to Eliot seems fairly clear. At the same time, Cernuda seems to gather his paradoxes into the last stage of his poem (“Lo renunciado es poseído ahora”, “En el tiempo sin tiempo”, “La identidad del día y de la noche”, “Las hojas idas mueve y las futuras”) in a way that suggests both the continuing influence of Yeats, whose shadow we have already observed hovering over “Río vespertino”, and a religious or semi-religious tone of quiescence, possibly inspired by Eliot's ultimate design in Four Quartets: “Del hombre aprende el hombre la palabra, Mas el silencio sólo en Dios to aprende.”

Though he has been described as the most un-Christian of poets, his religious faith was, one remembers, intermittent, and it is occasionally, as here, reflected in his poetry. The image of Cernuda as a poète maudit, which was fashionable in certain sectors in the sixties, and shows a tendency to persist even now, is not especially accurate and not at all helpful. For good or ill, he was dogged by his Catholic upbringing; and, as we have seen, under stress of perplexity he sometimes sought solace in religious illumination. Incidentally, such an orthodox reading of “Río vespertino” would remove from the lines on fe, contra toda razón” something of their present mystery, which we earlier took to have an aesthetic basis. One need not, of course, prefer this reading: merely see that it is possible. Another sort of transcendence is suggested by Jose Olivio Jiménez, when he writes: el propósito del poema no (...) es nunca en Cernuda el de ofrecer en síntesis una teoría ontológica, sino el de brindar, cuando más, los resortes espirituales más íntimos de una situación existencial.[75]

The existentialist movement cannot be left out of account, given the date of Cernuda's mature compositions and his openness to intellectual currents; but the ques tions that are bound to be asked concern specific models and actual opportunities, and it is unfortunate that J. Olivio Jimenez can come up with nothing more convincing than Collingwood, even though it is merely “por vía solo de referencia”[76] Yeats, Pound and Eliot were developing similar ideas lyrically, and it seems perverse to overlook them in explicating Cernuda. Jiménez marshals Rilke, Jaspers Heidegger and Sartre behind his banner, on which is emblazoned: ese mismo pensamiento de nuestro siglo (...) de que ninguna explicación o interpretación puede levantarse sino desde la intransferible y concreta realidad de la cosa única que se contempla o se juzga (...) Porque no hay objeto concebible que pueda escapar a esa ley, todo lo existente o pensable termina por convertirse, cuando más, en pura persistencia síquica: el recuerdo, la memoria. [77]

The problem is that, of the four writers named, only Rilke is unquestionably a factor in Cernuda's development. With the possible exception of Heidegger, the others are at best tangential, required reading for the cultivated mind of the period and our own, but probably too late on the scene to be of much use to Cernuda. Jiménez is most convincing when least specific, when he gives us passages like this:

Cuando se adquiere la noción de que toda la temporalidad cabe en un instante, de modo automático el espíritu aspira a desentrañar su correlato trascendente, pues aquel instante aparecerá nada mas que como símbolo o cifra de otro momento más profundo, no extratemporal o intemporal –instancias en suma inabarcables por el hombre– sino supratemporal, esto es, eterno y definitivo.[78]

The thought here is somewhat shadowy –what precisely is a “correlato trascendente”? and do the words extratemporal”, “intemporal” and “supratemporal” not leave us with at least one term too many within an avowedly existentialist framework?- but the conclusion is inescapable, and Jimenez clearsightedly states the issue which some of Cernuda's admirers and disciples of the fitties and sixties would not or could not face, viz. That the final direction of his mature poetry was no longer merely contemplative, moralising or meditative, but consciously metaphysical: Dondequiera sera fácil descubrir en Cernuda esa convicción de que todo auténtico conocimiento conlleva (SIC!) siempre la penetración hacia las zonas suprasensibles del ser.[79]

This is certainly true of Cernuda's poems of the forties, where his guide on such missions is inevitably Eliot, so much so that he actually forsakes his beloved San Juan de la Cruz –whom Eliot follows in parts of Four Quartets– to plunge into eastern mysticism. When one recalls his misgivings regarding Yeats's immersions in the occult, one cannot help wondering why he should have been so little averse to following Eliot in this direction. More than a question of his own greater maturity –it is not especially clear that the English influences were successive; he himself has claimed that they were accumulative[80]– it is likely that a question of authority is involved, and that age also counted. Yeats was almost forty years older than him, and his dabbling in the occult may have struck Cernuda as being both trivial and old-fashioned. On the other hand, Eliot represented the prestige of poetry and a philosophic interest in eastern thought. In any case, there now follows a series of poems in which the influence of Four Quartets is manifest. “El intruso” is a little regarded poem in which an apparently insignificant personal experience

–catching sight of his own face in a mirror– becomes the focus of a lyric on the passing of time and the meaning of personality. Like Eliot's travellers in “The Dry Salvages”, who “are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus.”[81]

the image in the mirror in Cernuda's poem hosca, abstraída, te interrumpe Tal la presencia ajena”[82]

This leads to the idea of the ageing process as a series of usurpations, realistically recognised: “Hoy este intruso eres tú mismo, Tú, como el otro antes ...”

But the poem, rather oddly, ends on a note of Buddhist resignation, when Cernuda departs from the naturalistic interpretation to assume a conception of altering personality quite different in kind, since the fundamental identity of the various manifestations is, apparently, taken for granted. There is, therefore, real drama in the final stanza, when the switch is effected from personal to suprapersonal or metaphysical lyric: “Para llegar al que no eres, Quien no eres te guía, Cuando el amigo es el extraño Y la rosa es la espina.”

A later poem, “El amante divaga” (Poemas para un cuerpo[83]) takes up the same theme: “El camino que sube Y el camino que baja Uno y el mismo son ...”

This is, of course, a rarified Cernuda, and not at all the poet Gil de Biedma took, in his perhaps Procrustean way, as a model for his new poetry of the early sixties, with the claim: Ese interés por la realidad de la experiencia común de cada uno, en cuanto materia poética, ha sido un factor importante en mi apreciación de Cernuda.[84]

This is quite correct, of course, and one sees how refreshingly direct Cernuda must have seemed to a younger generation, brought up on a diet of “Modernismo” and surrealism. But it does not do justice to the penetration of much of Cernuda's mature poetry, or to what we earlier called the quality of its thought. If one of the pleasures of the reader of Cernuda is this sense of fidelity to individual truth, another is surely the consciousness which we always have of being in the presence of a thinking mind. In the cases which here concern us, Cernuda is trying to come to grips with what J. Olivio Jiménez calls the “transcendence of time” , and Eliot, once again, holds the key: “In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through a way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.”[85]

Krishna, named by Eliot, seems inadequate to this outburst, and it is only by setting his rôle here beside that of San Juan and Heraclitus that one comes near a satis factory understanding of the thought of this poem. Cernuda's intentions, clarified in Poemas para un cuerpo (N.° XI), would indicate more specifically “The Dry Salvages” as the source of the lines quoted, especially: “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.”

together with the Greek motto from the titlepage. Eliot's influence continues dominant in Cernuda's poetry of this period, though there are poems like “El éxtasis”, where other poets seem to have a heavier stake. This poem almost certainly borrows its title and part of its theme from Donne's “The Extasie” , but there is little doubt that Cernuda is remembering two poems of Eliot's, which his diction inisistently recalls. The opening, “Tras el dolor, la angustia, el miedo”

pays distant tribute to the opening of “What the Thunder Said” (Part V of The Waste Land), but it is Four Quartets that provides Cernuda with the most important details of phrasing, and even imagery, for his own poem. It is a little difficult to say what the ecstasy is, though the poem obviously deals with a projection of consciousness into a timeless state beyond death. Here the anguish of selfawareness will have vanished, and the subjective and objective realms will merge. The narcissistic experience apparently at the origin of the thought is gradually displaced, and with the disappearance of the troubling sense of selfhood, a wordless joy is postulated as a sort of substitute beatific vision: “E iremos por el prado a las aguas, donde olvido, Sin gesto el gozo, muda la palabra, Vendrá, desde tu labio a mi labio, Fundirá en una sombra nuestras sombras.”[86]

The fusion of opposites is characteristic of Four Quartets, though the narcissistic element in “El éxtasis” is peculiar to Cernuda, and is a feature of his personality from his earliest poetry. The detail we referred to seems to be drawn from “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding”. For example, in Cernuda's second stanza, the lines “Sonreirán tus ojos Desconocido y conocido, con encanto De una rosa que es ella y recuerdo de otra rosa”

probably combine the “moment in the rose-garden” in “Burnt Norton” and the meeting with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding” “for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at”[87] “The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable.”[88]

Though Cernuda has almost inverted Eliot's main theme –the painful loss of self for the higher aim of salvation becomes a joyful selflessness in a pagan hereafter– he has made use of the same sensuous imagery and an identical obliqueness of thought. The clearest echoes of Eliot, however, come in Cernuda's penultimate stanza: “La hermosura que el haber vivido Pudo ser, unirá al alma La muerte así, en un presente inmóvil, Como el fauno en su mármol extasiado Es uno con la música.”

Much of this is a skilful restatement of major ideas in “Burnt Norton” , condensed by Cernuda into a species of contemporary pagan mythology. One recalls from Eliot: “Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end which is always present”[89] and “Words move, music moves Only in time. ………………………………………………….. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.”[90]

There are numerous other references and borrowings from Eliot scattered here and there throughout Cernuda's later poetry –e.g. in the passage we looked at from “Otras ruinas” , Cernuda's image for the enemy planes (“aves maléficas”) strongly suggests a debt to Eliot's image of the bomber as a negative paraclete, –“the dark dove with the flickering tongue”– but we have perhaps noticed enough to establish the importance of Eliot for the development of Cernuda's diction and imagery. These echoes are only the surface effect of a profound change in Cernuda's phrasing and a universalising of his subject matter that continued unabated throughout his last two major volumes, and which made possible the magnificent achievement of Poemas para un cuerpo, perhaps his most sustained effort in poetry of the highest order. After this, “Desolación de la quimera” is bound to seem a diminution, both in its narrow, even parochial, set of interests and its slack and prosy versification. The parallel with Eliot thus holds to the end, for after Four Quartets he effectively stopped writing poetry. The poetry of Eliot was therefore the last major influence undergone by Cernuda.

[1] “... si yo busqué aquella enseñanza y experiencia de la poesía inglesa fue porque ya la había encontrado, porque para ella estaba predispuesto.” Prosa, p. 921. [2] Ibid., pp. 761-76. [3] Ibid., p. 762.

[4] Ibid., p. 766. [5] Eliot, in “The Metaphysical Poets”, Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1976, p. 287. [6] Vid. Mª Dolores Arana, “Sobre Luis Cemuda”, in Papeles de Son Armadans, Palma de Mallorca, nº 39, dic. 1965, pp. 312, fr., for the suggestion that Cernuda's poetry shows an assimilation of certain of Heidegger's ideas. [7] Prosa, p. 761. [8] See esp. pp. 872-3, Prosa. [9] Ibid., p. 761. [10] Luis Maristany, “La poesía de Luis Cernuda”., in Taurus, p. 200. [11] Jaime Gil de Biedma, “Como en sí mismo al fin”, op. cit., p. 333. [12] Poesía, p. 417. [13] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in op. cit., p. 18. [14] Helen Gardner, The Art. of. T. S. Eliot, Faber, London, 1979, p. 59. Her discussion runs from pp. 59-61. [15] C. P. Otero, “Poeta de Europa”, Taurus, p. 132. [16] Gil de Biedma, “El ejemplo de Luis Cernuda”, in Taurus, p. 125. [17] Paz, op. cit., p. 145. [18] Prosa, p. 849. [19] See Prosa, p. 1.478, for dates. [20] Ibid., p. 453. [21] Ibid., p. 1.449. [22] bid., p. 1. 122. [23] Eliot, “Baudelaire”, op. cit., p. 426. Emphasis in orig. [24] Ibid., pp. 426-7. [25] C.L Villena's “La rebeldía del dandy....”, cited above. [26] Prosa, p. 660. [27] Ibid., p. 906. Harris (Study, p. 35) tells us Cernuda confirmed this borrowing to him in a letter. [28] Harris, Study, p. 35. [29] Eliot, “Hamlet”, op. cit., p. 145. [30] Quoted, Harris, Study, p. 36. [31] Prosa, p. 906. [32] Eliot, “Hamlet”, op. cit., p. 145 [33] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, op. cit., pp. 20-21. [34] Coleman, op. cit., p. 31. [35] Ibid., p. 42. [36] Gil de Biedma, El pie de la letra, p. 341. [37] Vid. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry oj' Experience, London, Chatto & Windus, 1957 [38] Gil de Biedma, op. cit., p. 342. [39] Poesía, p. 176. Emphasis added. [40] As is well known, Cernuda picked it up from Eliot's phrase “the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera”, in “Burnt Norton”, V. p. 194. (All subsequent quotations from Eliot's poetry are from Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber, London, 1974; hereafter “Eliot”.) [41] Poesía, p. 506. [42] “Goethe y Mr Eliot”, Prosa, pp. 1.048-75. [43] Paz comments: “Aunque nuestro poeta no aprendió el arte del poema largo en Eliot... las ideas del escritor ing1és aclararon las suyas y modificaron parcialmente sus concepciones. Pero una cosa son las ideas y otras el temperamento de cada uno. La armonía implica el reconocimiento de otras voces y acordes; la melodía es lírica, y Cernuda sólo es, y es bastante, un poeta lírico. Así, la forma más afín a su naturaleza fue el monólogo.” (“La palabra edificante”, Taurus, p. 146)

[44] Gil de Biedma, op. cit., p. 337. [45] See Poesías, p. 31, for dates. [46] Helen Gardner, op. cit., pp. 99-100. [47] Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, Yale Univ. Pr. 1955 [48] J. A. Valente, “Luis Cernuda y la poesía de la meditación”, Taurus, p. 309. [49] Ibid , p. 308. [50] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 238. [51] See E. M. Wilson,”Cernuda's Debts”, in Studies in Modern Spanish Literature Presented to Helen F. Grant, London, Támesis Books Ltd, 1972, for a number of instances. [52] Poesías, p. 307. [53] Eliot, p. 15. [54] Poesía, p. 328. [55] Eliot, p. 63. [56] This is especially the case in the poems of Vivir sin estar viviendo. [57] Poesía, p. 301. [58] Eliot, p. 205. [59] R. Gullón, op. cit., p. 64. [60] Juan Goytisolo, “Homenaje a Luis Cernuda”, Taurus, p. 175. [61] Helen Gardner, op. cit. pp. 10-12. [62] The last-mentioned is most forthright: “Pero lo que domina en estos libros es un tipo de poesía que ni siquiera es agresivamente prosaico, sino de una irremediable vulgaridad.” (Tomás Segovia, “La realidad y el deseo”, Taurus, p. 53.) [63] For the importance of Unamuno in Cernuda's approach to the English poets, see José Ángel Valente, op. cit., Taurus, esp pp. 306-8. [64] Detailed information of this incident is given by Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 171-2. [65] Poesía, p. 336. [66] Ibid. [67] Vid. T. McMullan, op. cit., Taurus, p. 252. [68] Eliot, p. 218. [69] Ibid., p. 203 [70] Prosa, p. 915 & pp. 922-3. [71] Ibid., p. 370. [72] Eliot, p. 213. [73] Poesía, p. 338. [74] Eliot, p. 192. [75] J. O. Jiménez, "Emoción y trascendencia...”, p. 66-7 [76] Ibid., p. 67. [77] Ibid., pp. 70-71. [78] Ibid., p. 74. [79] Ibid., p. 75. [80] Prosa, p. 923. [81] Eliot, p. 210. [82] Poesía, p. 356. [83] Ibid., p. 453. [84] Gil de Biedma, El pie de la letra, p. 333. [85] Eliot, p. 201. [86] Poesía, p. 374.

[87] Eliot, p. 190. [88] Ibid., p. 217. [89] Ibid., p. 190. [90] Ibid., p. 194.

Conclusions If we try to draw together all the strands of the argument, we shall find ourselves, perhaps, in a position to state theree main conclusions, viz: 1) that the English influences on Cernuda's work –even disregarding the considerable number of earlier English poets whom we do not investigate– are more deep-rooted, and affect wider areas of Cernuda's thought, than is generally recognised; 2) that the parallels with Yeats and Eliot, in particular, are so clear that the word “coincidences” is inadequate to describe them, unless one makes the word mean “a shared set of aims and intentions” and “exposure to the operation of similar minds”, in which case we may more economically continue to speak of “influences”, since that is what one commonly means by the term; 3) that under the stress of these influences, Cernuda's conception of poetry underwent a radical reorganisation, principally involving a new sense of the objectivisation of the speaker, the autonomy of the poetic artefact, and the freeing of the line from the tyranny of rhythmic regularity. Touching the last point, though we have quoted him as saying he developed an early aversion to the “ritmo demasiado acusado”, his early craftsmanship had instilled in him a tendency to lapidary phrasing, and it is not until after his experiments, in the Browningesque dramatic monologue that he begins to distribute his rhythmic counterpoint in a natural way, i.e. more in accordance with context or character. One can see this, for example, by comparing “Duerme, muchacho” or “A un muchacho andaluz” with “Noche del hombre y su demonio” or “Nocturno yanqui”, though in the later poems the stanza form is retained. Apart from this question of diction, and apart from the examples –much more numerous than we could take detailed notice of– which we have detected of direct debts of style and expression, we have noticed time and again Cernuda's departure from the unadorned “I” of his early work to a much more complex and sophisticated approach, which partakes both of Yeats's theory of the Mask, and Eliot's doctrine of impersonality. If we use the term “Romantic” in this connection, we are treading on dangerous ground, partly, as we have said, because of Spain's peculiar relation with the Romantic movement in Europe. In the sense in which the word is currently used in English, French or German, Cernuda hardly seems to fit the description. If anything, his early poems share something of the «modernista» aura of the early century. But, as he quickly adopted Unamuno, rather than Juan Ramón Jiménez, as mentor, his taste for northern Romanticism (of which his beloved Bécquer is, in some ways, a late product) soon led to a taste for what followed it: the Victorians, then Modernism. Browning, then, and later, Yeats, became his master. From the former we have seen that he learned the technique of projecting his experience upon a persona, and it was a technique of which he grew fond and at which he became adept. We suggested, tentatively, that Browning's deliberate harshness may have betrayed Cernuda at times into an odd sort of awkward prosody, and a wordiness, which was just what he was seeking to suppress. It may also be felt that Cernuda had little real talent for the handling of dramatic situations, and that a number of his dramatic monologues tend to create a voice which is really his own, aggravated and distorted by the device. However, his discovery of the technique is crucial, as it seems to have opened his eyes to what Yeats and Eliot were doing, in their different ways. This, with his great gifts, and his alert, enquiring mind revealed the possibility of making the speaker a kind of construct, an aggregate modern consciousness, aware of the diversity of experience, the beating of his own mind and the desire for order and symmetry. Internal coherence becomes his aim, and the aesthetic experience comes, in a way, to seem an answer –perhaps the only one– to the problem of the destructiveness of time and the contrary impulse towards eternity and beauty: the resolution, in Modernist terms, of the conflict between reality and desire. Summarising, we may say that Browning gave him a new method and the beginnings of a new style, Yeats helped him polish his technique and centre his themes, and Eliot taught him how this new technique and this new language could be adapted to the modern sensibility by drawing discreetly on the tradition, achieving “an easy commerce of the old and new”. These influences, together, naturally, with his own experience and consummate skill, made Cernuda what he was not before he left Spain, and possibly would not have been otherwise: “poeta de Europa”. As such, he has become one of the most original, as well 'as one of the profoundest Spanish poets of any time.

Select Bibliography EDITIONS USED: CERNUDA: Poesía Completa (ed. D. Harris & L. Maristany), Barral Editores, Barcelona, 2ª ed. revisada, abril, 1977. - Prosa Completa (ed. D. Harris & L. Maristany), Barral Editores, Barcelona, 1975. BROWNING: Poetical Works (ed. Ian Jack), Ox Stan Authors, O.U.P., 1970. - Dramatis Personae (ed. F. B. Pinion), Collins, London & Glasgow, 1969. - Men and Women (ed. J. W. Harper), Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1977. YEATS: Collected Poems, Macmillan, London, 1978. - Collected Plays, Macmillan, London, 1952. - Essays & Introductions, Macmillan, London, 1961. - Mythologies, Macmillan, London, 1959. ELIOT: Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber, London, 1963. - Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1976. MONOGRAPHS: JOSE MARÍA CAPOTE BENOT: El período sevillano de Luis Cernuda, Madrid, Gredos,1971. ALEXANDER COLEMAN: Other Voices: A Study of the Late Poetry of Luis Cernuda. Chapel Hill, Univ. of N. Carolina Press, N.° 81, 1969. AGUSTÍN DELGADO: La poética de Luis Cernuda. Alfar, Madrid, 1975. DEREK HARRIS: Perfil del Aire: Edición y Estudio. London, Támesis Books Ltd, 1971. - Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry. London, Támesis Books Ltd, 1973. RAFAEL MARTÍNEZ NADAL: Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda. Hiperión, Madrid, 1983. ELISABETH MÜLLER: Die Dichtung Luis Cernudas. Kölner Romanistische Arbeiten, Geneva/Paris, 1962. CARLOS RUIZ SILVA: Arte, amor y otras soledades de Luis Cernuda. Ediciones de la Torre, Madrid', 1979. PHILIP SILVER: “Et in Arcadia Ego”: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda. Támesis Books Ltd, London, 1965. JENARO TALÉNS: El espacio y las máscaras, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1975. SELECT LIST OF ARTICLES, STUDIES, ETC.:

J. M. AGUIRRE: “Primeras poesías de Luis Cernuda” , in Luis Cernuda (Serie: El Escritor y la Crítica), ed. D. Harris, Taurus, Madrid, 1977, pp. 215-27. VICENTE ALEIXANDRE: “Luis Cernuda” , ibid., pp. 15-17. Mª DOLORES ARANA: “Sobre Luis Cernuda” , Papeles de Son Armadans, Palma de Mallorca, XXXIX, dic., 1965, 311-28. JOSE LUIS ARANGUREN: “La evolution espiritual de los intelectuales españoles en la emigration”, Crítica y meditation, Madrid, 1955. ENRIQUE AZCOAGA: “Figuras: Luis Cernuda”, El Luchador, Alicante, 9-11-35, p. 1. JOSE BERGAMÍN: “El idealismo andaluz”, La Gaceta Literaria, Madrid, 1-VI-27, p. 7. ESTHER BARTOLOMÉ PONS: “Tiempo, amor y muerte en el lenguaje poético de Luis Cernuda”, Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 415, junio, 1981, pp. 1, 12. V. BODINI: “Luis Cernuda”, in Los poetas surrealistas españoles, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1971. CARLOS BOUSOÑO & D. ALONSO: Seis calas en la expresión literaria española, Madrid, Gredos, 1951, pp. 270-76. RICA BROWN: “Two Contemporary Spanish Poets” , Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Liverpool, XV, n.° 60 (1938), 195-202. ANTONIO BLANCH: La poesía pura española, Gredos, Madrid, 1976, passim. FELICIDAD BLANC: Espejo de sombras, Argos Vergara, Barcelona, 1977, pp. 162-72. JOSÉ LUIS CANO: La poesía de la generation del 27, Madrid, Guadarrama, 1973, 189-256. MERCEDES CÁRDENAS: “Un tema cernudiano: el poeta como ser privilegiado”, Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 327, feb., 1974, p. 10. BIRUTÉ CIPLIJAUSKAITÉ: La soledad en la poesía española contemporánea. Ínsula, Madrid, 1962. J. F. CIRRE: “Trascendentalismo poético”, Taurus op. cit. pp. 96-101. G. CORREA: “Mallarmé y Garcilaso en Cernuda” , in Taurus, op. cit. pp. 228-43. ANGEL CRESPO (ed.): Luis Cernuda: “Cartas a Eugenio de Andrade”, Olifante, Zaragoza, 1979. ROSA CHACEL: “Luis Cernuda: un poeta”, La Caña Gris (Valencia), núms. 6-8, Otoño 1962, pp. 18-20. FERNANDO CHARRY LARA: “Luis Cernuda” , Taurus, pp. 59-68. ANDREW P. DEBICKI: “Luis Cernuda: la naturaleza y la poesía en su obra lírica”, in Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea, Gredos, Madrid, 1968, pp. 285-306. JUAN FERRATÉ: “Luis Cernuda y el poder de las palabras”, in Taurus, pp. 269-83.

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA: “En homenaje a Luis Cernuda”, in Taurus, pp. 25-6. JUAN GIL-ALBERT: “Fecha conmemorativa”; La Caña Gris, otoño 1962, pp. 26-7. - “Encuentro con Luis Cernuda” , Taurus, pp. 20-24. - “Realidad y deseo en Luis Cernuda” , in 3 Luis Cernuda, Publicaciones de la Univ. de Sevilla, núm. 60, 1977, pp. 37-107. JAIME GIL DE BIEDMA: “El ejemplo de Luis Cernuda” , in El pie de la letra, Editorial Crítica, Grijalbo, Barcelona, 1980, 68-74. - “Luis Cernuda y la expresión poética en prosa”, ibid., pp. 318-30. - “Como en sí mismo al fin”, ibid., pp. 331-47. JUAN GOYTISOLO: “Cernuda y la crítica literaria española”, in El furgón de cola, Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1967. pp. 100-16. - “Homenaje a Cernuda” , Taurus, pp. 161-75. RICARDO GULLÓN: “La poesía de Luis Cernuda” , Asomante, San Juan de Puerto Rico, VI, núms. 2 & 3, 1950. DEREK HARRIS: “Ejemplo de fidelidad po6tica: el superrealismo de Cernuda”, La Caña Gris (otoño '62), pp. 102-8. - “A Primitive Version of Luis Cernuda's Elegy on the Death of Lorca”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Liverpool, L, n.° 4, Oct. '73, pp. 357-73. - “Cartas de Luis Cernuda a Jorge Gillén”, Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 324, dic. 1973, 1& 3-4. JOSÉ HIERRO: “Notas sobre la crítica en Cernuda” La Caña Gris, otoño, 62, pp. 21-5. BRIAN HUGHES: “Cernuda and the Poetic Imagination: Primeras poesías as Metaphysical Poetry” , Anales de Literatura Española, Univ. de Alicante, núm. 1, 1982. PAUL ILIE: “Two more Spanish surrealists (Cernuda & Hinojosa)”, Los surrealistas españoles, Madrid, Taurus, 1972. JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ: “A Luis Cernuda”, La Corriente Infinita, Aguilar, Madrid, 1961, pp. 171-9. RAUL LEIVA: -El experimento de Luis Cernuda: Centenario de "Rubén Darío"“, La Gaceta, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, XIV, núm. 149, 1967, pp. 1-2. JOSE LEZAMA LIMA: “Soledades habitadas por Cernuda”, Taurus, pp. 49-52. F. LÓPEZ ESTRADA: “Estudios y cartas de Cernuda (1926-1929)”,Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 207, feb. 1964, 3 & 16-7. F. LUCIO: “A propósito de la "Poesía Completa" de Luis Cernuda” , Camp de I'Arpa, Barcelona, n.° 16, en. 1975, pp. 27-9. LEOPOLDO DE LUIS: “La soledad poblada”, Cántico, Córdoba, núms. 9-10, 1955.

LUIS MARISTANY: “La poesía de Luis Cernuda” , Taurus, pp. 185-202. DAVID MARTÍNEZ: “Luis Cernuda; poeta existencial”, Revista de la Univ. de Córdoba (Argentina), V, núms. 1-2, 1964, pp. 145-70. IVY McCLELLAND: “Como quien espera el alba” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Liverpool, XXV, n.° 99, July 1948, pp. 180-2. TERENCE McMULLAN: “Luis Cernuda y la influencia emergente de Pierre Reverdy”, Taurus, pp. 244-68. CONCHA MÉNDEZ: “Luis Cernuda”, Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 207, feb. 1964, p. 13. RICARDO MOLINA: “Justicia Poética: Luis Cernuda”, Cántico, Cordoba, n.° 4, 1954. - “La conciencia trágica del tiempo, clave esencial de la poesía de Luis Cernuda”, Cántico, Córdoba, pp. 9-10, 1955. E. MOLINA CAMPOS: « Románticos españoles y románticos ingleses”, Caracola, Málaga, ndm. 76, feb. 1959. JOSÉ MORENO VILLA: Vida en claro, México, El Colegio de México, 1944. C. MORLA LYNCH: En España con Federico García Lorca. Madrid, 1957, p. 229, ff. C. B. MORRIS: A Generation of Spanish Poets, 19201936, Camb Un Press, passim. – Surrealism and Spain, Camb Un Press, passim. JACOBO MUÑOZ: «Poesía y pensamiento político en Luis Cernuda”, Taurus, pp. 111-23. - “Fidelidad es supervivencia”, La Caña Gris, núm. 3, invierno '60-61, pp. 20-25. J. A. MUÑOZ ROJAS: “Recuerdo de Luis Cernuda”, Taurus, pp. 18-9. R. K. Newman: “Primeras poesías, 1924-1927”, La Caña Gris, núms. 6-8, etc., pp. 84-99. – “El hombre visto a través de su poesía”, Ínsula, Madrid, n.° 207, feb. 1964, pp. 6 & 13. JOSÉ OLIVIO JIMÉNEZ: “Emoción y trascendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Cernuda”, La Caña Gris 6-8, etc., pp. 45-83. – “Desolación de la Quimera”, Taurus, pp. 326-335. C. M. DE ONÍS: El surrealismo y cuatro poetas de la generation del 27. Madrid, Jose Porrua Turanzas, '74, pp. 209-44. C. P. OTERO: Letras 1, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1972, passim. - “Poeta de Europa”, Taurus, pp. 129-37. - «Cernuda y los románticos ingleses”, Quimera, Barcelona, enero 1982, n.° 15, pp. 33-8. (NOTE: in the same number, R. Argullol: «Cernuda, Romántico”, pp. 29-32). OCTAVIO PAZ: “La palabra edificante”, Taurus, pp. 138-60. J. ROMERO Y MURUBE: “Responso difícil por un poeta sevillano”, Taurus, pp. 29-30.

JUAN DE DIOS RUIZ-COPETE: “Luis Cernuda: Un romántico en el XX”, Poetas de Sevilla, ed. González Cabañas, Sevilla, 1971, pp. 153-66. PEDRO SALINAS: Ensayos de literatura hispánica. Madrid, Aguilar, 1958, pp. 359-75. –“Luis Cernuda, poeta”, Literatura española, siglo XX, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1979, pp. 213-21. MAYA SCHRARER: “Luis Cernuda y el reflejo”, Taurus, pp. 314-25. TOMÁS SEGOVIA: “La realidad y el deseo”, ibid., pp. 53-8. A. SERRANO PLAJA: “Notas a la poesía de Luis Cernuda” , Taurus, pp. 40-8. GUSTAV SIEBENMANN: Los estilos poéticos en España desde 1900. Gredos, Madrid, 1973, passim. GIUSEPPE TAVANI: «Verso e frase nella poesia di Cernuda” , Studi di Letteratura Spagnola. Rome, 1966, pp. 71-126. FRANCISCO UMBRAL: “La poesía de Luis Cernuda”. Poesía Española, Madrid, núm. 132 (diciembre, 1963), pp. 7-11. JOSÉ ÁNGEL VALENTE: “Luis Cernuda y la poesía de la meditation”, Taurus, pp. 303-13. - “Luis Cernuda en su mito”, Insula, Madrid, núm. 207 (feb., 1964), p. 2. ADRIANO DEL VALLE: « Oscura noticia de Luis Cernuda”, Cántico, Cordoba, núms. 9-10, agosto-noviembre, 1955. LUIS ANTONIO DE VILLENA: “Luis Cernuda y el fuego superrealista”. Ínsula, Madrid, núm. 337, dic., 1974, p. 4. – “La rebeldía del dandy en Luis Cernuda”, 3 Luis Cernuda, Univ. de Sevilla, n.° 60, 1977, pp. 109-55. LUIS FELIPE VIVANCO: “Luis Cernuda en su palabra vegetal indolente”, Introducción a la poesía española contemporánea. Madrid, Guadarrama, 1957, pp. 295338. - “Luis Cernuda y su demonio”, in Historia general de las literaturas hispanicas (ed.: C. Díaz-Plaja), Vergara, Barcelona, 1967, a. VI, pp. 563-78. E. M. WILSON: “Cernuda's Debt”, Studies in Modern Spanish Literature Presented to Helen F. Grant. London, Támesis Books Limited, 1972, pp. 239-53. MARÍA ZAMBRANO: “Luis Cernuda” , La Caña Gris 6-8, etc., pp. 15-6. CONCHA ZARDOYA: “Luis Cernuda, el “peregrino” sin retorno”, Ínsula, Madrid, nums. 400-401, marzo-abril, 1980, pp. 14 & 36. EMILIA DE ZULETA: “La poesía de Luis Cernuda” , in Cinco poetas españoles, Gredos, Madrid, 1971, pp. 396-458. ISSUES OF JOURNALS DEVOTED WHOLLY OR IN PART TO CERNUDA:

Cántico (Cordoba), núms. 9-10 (agosto-noviembre, 1955). La caña gris (Valencia), núms. 6-8 (otoño de 1962). Agora (Madrid), núms. 83-84 (septiembre-octubre de 1963). Nivel (Mexico), núm. 12 (diciembre de 1963). Revista mexicana de literatura (Mexico), enero-febrero de 1964. Ínsula (Madrid), núm. 207 (feb. de 1964). Sin nombre (Puerto Rico), núm. 4 (1976). Cuadernos hispanoamericanos (Madrid), núm. 316 (oct. de 1976).