Editing Vicente Aleixandre (section)

==His works==
His early collections of poetry include ''Passion of the Earth'' (1935) and ''Destruction or Love'' (1933). In 1944, he wrote ''Shadow of Paradise'', the poetry where he first began to concentrate on themes such as fellowship, friendliness, and spiritual unity. His later books of poetry include ''History of the Heart'' (1954) and ''In a Vast Dominion'' (1962).

Aleixandre studied law at the [[Complutense University of Madrid|University of Madrid]]. Selections of his work were translated into English in ''Twenty Poems of Vicente Aleixandre'' (1977) and ''A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vincent Aleixandre'' (1979; [[Copper Canyon Press]], 2007) translated by [[Lewis Hyde]].

During the [[Spanish Civil War|Civil War]] Aleixandre was among the contributors of ''[[El Mono Azul]]'', a Republican cultural magazine.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Silvina Schammah Gesser|author2=Alexandra Cheveleva Dergacheva
|editor1=Raanan Rein|editor2=Joan Maria Thomás|title=Spain 1936: Year Zero|year=2018|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M5vHugEACAAJ|page=194|publisher=Sussex Academic Press
|location=Brighton|isbn=978-1845198923|chapter=An Engagé in Spain: Commitment and Its Downside in Rafael Alberti’s Philo-Sovietism}}</ref>

===Pure poetry===
His first book, ''Ámbito'', written between 1924 and 1927 and published in [[Málaga]] in 1928, is the work of an incipient poet who has not yet found his own voice. The assonated short verse and [[art for art's sake]] aesthetics of [[Juan Ramón Jiménez]] and [[Jorge Guillén]] prevail, in addition to the [[Ultraism|ultraistic]] echoes of classical Spanish poetry from the [[Golden Age]], especially [[Fray Luis de León]] and [[Góngora]].

===Surreal poetry===
In the following years, between 1928 and 1932, there is a radical change in Aleixandre's poetic conception. Inspired by the predecessors of [[surrealism]] (especially [[Arthur Rimbaud]] and [[Lautréamont]]) and by [[Freud]], he adopts [[prose poetry]] (''Passion of the Earth'', 1935), [[free verse]], and plainly surreal methods such as free verse and the visionary image (''[[Swords like Lips]]'', 1932; ''[[Destruction or Love]]'', 1935; ''[[Shadow of Paradise]]'', 1944) as his form of expression. The aesthetics of these poems are irrational, and the expression comes close to "flow", even without accepting it as a dogma of faith. Along with surrealism, the poet does not take on any tradition, not even the metric, and frees himself. [[Luis Cernuda]] could say: "Your verse is like nothing else." And in effect his style brings unpublished stylistic novelties such as the inverted [[simile]] (''Swords like Lips'') or the equivalent disjunctive nexus (''Destruction or Love''), the [[hyperbole]] adds, the uncoded dream [[symbol]], enriching without question the stylistic possibilities of the Spanish poetic language, just as [[Garcilaso de la Vega (poet)|Garcilaso]], [[Góngora]] and [[Rubén Darío]], each one a great renovator of lyric language, did in the past. The poet celebrates love as a natural, ungovernable force that breaks down all human limitations and criticizes the conventionalism with which society attempts to conquer it.