Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Influences===

It was at the urging of Pedro Salinas that Cernuda began to read classical Spanish poets such as [[Garcilaso de la Vega (poet)|Garcilaso]], [[Luis de León]], [[Luis de Góngora|Góngora]], [[Lope de Vega]], [[Francisco de Quevedo|Quevedo]] and [[Pedro Calderón de la Barca|Calderón de la Barca]]. He also urged him to learn French and to read modern French literature, in particular [[André Gide]] and the poetry of [[Baudelaire]], [[Stéphane Mallarmé|Mallarmé]] and [[Rimbaud]].<ref name="Cernuda627"/> Cernuda also became acquainted with the poetry of [[Pierre Reverdy]] and counts him as a major influence over the poems in his first collection, ''Perfil del aire'', for his qualities of spareness, purity and reticence.<ref name="Cernuda627"/> No contemporary critic recognised this influence. In ''Un río, un amor'', "Destierro" echoes Reverdy's poetry in its evocation of a solitary existence in a hostile urban world.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio55">Harris notes to Un río etc p 55</ref> He also read [[Comte de Lautréamont|Lautréamont]]'s ''Les Chants de Maldoror'' and ''Préface a un livre futur'', although their influence emerged at a later time when Cernuda began to explore the French Surrealist movement.

Just before he completed ''Perfil del aire'', in March 1926, the Madrid book-seller León Sánchez Cuesta had already delivered to him a copy of ''Le Libertinage'' by Louis Aragon.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio" /> In the time just after the publication of ''Perfil del aire'', he began to read other books by the leaders of the [[Surrealist]] movement - [[André Breton]], [[Paul Eluard]], [[Louis Aragon]] and [[René Crevel]]. He strongly identified with their boldness and their sense of alienation from their society<ref name="Cernuda632"/> and this emerges clearly in his third and fourth collections.

While he was halfway through writing the poems of ''Invocaciones'', he began to read [[Hölderlin]], which he describes as one of his greatest experiences in poetry.<ref name="Cernuda640"/> He had grown tired of the very restricted range of literature championed by the French surrealists and was starting to interest himself in English and German poetry. In order to read them, he began to learn these languages. He was enthralled by the depth and poetic beauty that he discovered in Hölderlin and discovered not just a new vision of the world but also a new means of poetic expression.<ref name="Cernuda641" /> In a note that he wrote to accompany some translations of Hölderlin, Cernuda describes him as imbued with the force of pagan myths, "a living echo of pagan forces now buried". He thinks that Hölderlin's metaphysical lyricism is closer to Keats rather than Blake "although at times, in his fragments which have such dark transcendence, he is not so far from the prophetic songs of the latter." There is a strong sense of Cernuda identifying himself with Hölderlin as he describes his alienation from the world he lived in. For him, "the secret forces of earth are the only realities, far from the conventions that govern society." He also notes an occasion in which the poet was discovered one day in rapture at the feet of some Classical statues in a Paris park.<ref name="Cernuda2103">Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Hölderlin Nota Marginal p 103-5</ref> In ''Invocaciones'' there are two poems that explicitly invoke ancient Greek gods and they seem to link closely to this reference. In "Himno a la tristeza", sadness is seen as something gifted by the gods to mankind, as in Hölderlin's "Die Heimat" and, more directly, in "A las estatuas de los dioses", Cernuda portrays how "although forgotten and humiliated in an alien, degraded world, the gods still represent an age of joy, innocence, and harmony, when love was still possible."<ref name="Harris A Study70">Harris: Luis Cernuda A Study of the Poetry p 70</ref> For Cernuda, Hölderlin is as much a kindred spirit as an influence: they share a pantheistic vision of Nature, a sense of tragic destiny (the ''poder daimónico'' described by Cernuda in many poems and essays), the same conviction that society was hostile to the Poet, the same nostalgia for a lost Golden Age of harmony.<ref name="Harris A Study67" /> Before he even read Hölderlin, these themes emerge in the "Egloga", the "Oda", and "De qué país" from ''Los placeres prohibidos''.<ref name="Harris A Study68">Harris: Luis Cernuda A Study of the Poetry p 68</ref>

During his stay in Paris in 1936, he bought a copy of the [[Greek Anthology]] in a French translation. He was stimulated by the concise and penetrating style of these poems and epigrams.<ref name="Cernuda642"/>

After his move to Great Britain in September 1938, Cernuda continued the exploration of English literature that he had begun the previous spring. While he was reading Eliot, Blake, Keats, Shakespeare's plays, he was struck by their lack of verbal ornamentation compared with Spanish and French poetry. He discovered that a poet could achieve a deeper poetic effect by not shouting or declaiming, or repeating himself, by avoiding bombast and grandiloquence. As in those epigrams in the Greek anthology, he admired the way that concision could give a precise shape to a poem. He learned to avoid two literary vices, the [[pathetic fallacy]] and "purple patches", avoiding undue subjectivity or features that did not fit in with the overall conception of the poem.<ref name="Cernuda646" /> The tendencies had been there, to gradually increasing extent, in his poetry from the outset but his reading confirmed him on this route. He also read [[Robert Browning|Browning]] and learned how to take a dramatic, historic or legendary situation and to project his own emotional state onto it, in order to achieve greater objectivity, as in poems such as "Lázaro", "Quetzalcóatl", "Silla del Rey", or "El César".<ref name="Cernuda647" />

In a study of Cernuda's influences, E.M. Wilson suggests that, soon after his arrival in England, he began to emulate the way that [[T.S. Eliot]] borrows and alludes to works by other writers. He provides examples of such possible borrowings from Rodrigo Caro, Baudelaire, Luis de León and Quevedo. He also suggests that Lope de Vega and George Herbert were the sources for another 2 poems, "Divertimento" and "La poesía". Eliot's influence is also suggested in an essay by Octavio Paz - "La palabra edificante".<ref name="Grant252">Cernuda's Debts in Studies in Modern Spanish Literature and Art presented to Helen Grant p 252</ref> One significant borrowing from Eliot is the title of his last collection of poetry, ''Desolación de la Quimera'', which alludes to a line from "Burnt Norton"<blockquote><poem>The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera</poem></blockquote>in itself an allusion to a sermon by [[John Donne]].
 
At Mount Holyoke he started to read ''Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Presocratics)'' by [[Hermann Diels]] with the help of an English translation. In Mexico, he read [[John Burnet (classicist)|John Burnet]]'s ''Early Greek Philosophy''. These fragments of pre-Socratic thought seemed to him the most profound and poetic philosophical works he had ever read. The world of ancient Greece is often recalled in his poetry.<ref name="Cernuda657">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 657</ref> It reminded him of his childhood reading of a book of Greek mythology which, even at that early age, had been sufficient to make his religious beliefs seem sad and depressing. He tried to express something of that experience in "El poeta y los mitos" in ''Ocnos''.<ref name=Cernuda657 />