Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

====Un río, un amor (1929)====

Cernuda started work on this collection during his period in Toulouse. He visited Paris in the Easter vacation of 1929 and was bowled over by the museums and the book-stalls. He spent his days soaking up the sights. One day, back in Toulouse, he wrote "Remordimiento en traje de noche" and discovered a style that enabled him to express poetic needs that he had not been able to communicate up till then. He had not written any poetry since before his arrival in Toulouse in 1928 but he produced the first 3 poems of the new collection in quick succession. His dissatisfaction with the conventions of fashionable poetry had been freed by contact with surrealism.  For Cernuda, surrealism was more than a literary phenomenon: it a was the expression of an attitude against conformity.<ref name="Cernuda634">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 634</ref> The poems in this collection break with the concept of pure poetry. He retains the precision and elegance of his language but infuses it with more passion and intensity.<ref name=Villena19>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 19</ref> He continued work on this collection after his return to Madrid.

The influence of the Surrealists is shown by the complexity of the free-flowing imagery, some of it inspired by random discoveries such as the title of a jazz record (as a jazz fan, he used to scour record catalogues and was intrigued by titles such as "I want to be alone in the South"), the name of an American city such as Durango or Daytona, a title card from a silent film, or an image from a talking picture such as [[White Shadows in the South Seas]] which he had seen in Paris. The metrical schemes and rhyme patterns of the first two collections are largely abandoned. This was the first collection in which he made use of what he calls free verse. In reality, this amounts to ignoring classical Spanish verse forms and rhyme schemes, such as ''letrillas'' - in fact, from this point on Cernuda rarely uses full rhyme or even assonance - even though he often felt a need to write in a lyrical style.<ref name="Cernuda635">Cernuda. OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 635</ref> A few of the poems in this book are written in alexandrine quatrains and most have some kind of metrical pattern, which makes them unusual in the context of the Surrealist movement.<ref name=Connell204>Connell p 204</ref> In a poem such as "¿Son todos felices?", Cernuda makes it clear what attracted him to the Surrealists, their protest against society and the pressure to conform. In this poem, honour, patriotism and duty are seen as worthless in comparison to the suffering they inflict on the rebel or non-conformist. Just being alive and living according to the rules is equivalent to being dead. It is noteworthy that this poem contains the first unequivocal expression of homoerotic attraction in his poetry.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio82">Harris notes to Un río, un amor p 82</ref> The collection, like its successor, remained unpublished until 1936, when they were gathered into the first edition of ''La realidad y el deseo''.