Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Criticism===

Cernuda wrote critical essays throughout his career, many of which were published in newspapers or magazines. Towards the end of his life, however, he brought out 4 collections of his most important pieces.

The first was ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'' (Madrid 1957). The conception of this work probably dates back to the 1940s but he only began work on the articles that comprise it in 1954. Cernuda gives a survey of what seem to him to be the most important currents in Spanish poetry from the 19th century onwards. He deliberately omits any neo-Classical or Romantic poets and starts with [[Ramón de Campoamor y Campoosorio|Ramón de Campoamor]]. He also covers Bécquer and [[Rosalía de Castro]] before moving on to a general essay on "[[Modernismo]] and the [[Generation of 1898]]". This is followed by individual essays on [[Miguel de Unamuno]], Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. He then moves on to [[León Felipe]], [[José Moreno Villa]] and Gómez de la Serna before focusing on his contemporaries, Salinas, Guillėn, Lorca, Diego, Alberti, Aleixandre and Altolaguirre. He ends the collection with some thoughts on developments since 1936. These articles were first published in a magazine called ''México en la Cultura'' between 1954 and 1956. The subsequent publication of the collected articles was delayed by the uproar that some of them had provoked, especially the essays on Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salinas and Guillén. It was eventually published in 1957 in a heavily bowdlerised version that omitted chapters relating to Guillén, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Diego and Alberti.<ref name="Cernuda835">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 notes p 835</ref>

His next collection was ''Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa'' (Mexico 1958). Luis Maristany suggests that it is more interesting as an indication of Cernuda's interests than as a work of criticism in its own right, given that it was written up in Mexico from his notes at a time when he lacked access to a proper English language library and so could not properly develop his arguments. Yet, his audience was attracted by the novelty of a study of English poetry, written by a Spaniard.<ref name="Cernuda56">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 El ensayo literario p 56</ref> In a letter to Derek Harris, dated March 3, 1961, Cernuda states that "English literature, from my arrival in England (1938) until now, has been part of my daily reading."<ref name="Epistolario908">Epistolario Letter to Derek Harris p 908</ref> In his essay on Aleixandre, collected in the ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'', he writes of his fascination with the tradition of poet-critics in English literature, comparing unfavourably the writings of such people as [[Sainte-Beuve]] and [[Menéndez y Pelayo]] with [[Coleridge]], [[Keats]], [[Matthew Arnold|Arnold]] and Eliot.<ref name="Cernuda224">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 notes p 224</ref> He was particularly inspired by his reading of essays by Eliot such as "The Frontiers of Criticism" and "Tradition and the Individual Talent".<ref name="Cernuda20">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 El ensayo literario p 20</ref> The collection shows just how extensive and deep his reading of English literature was, as it contains studies of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne and Hopkins.

''Poesía y literatura, I y II'' (Barcelona 1960, 1964) These collections gathered together his most important essays or articles on literary themes. They display the extraordinary range of his reading, covering authors as diverse as Galdós, Goethe, Hölderlin, Cervantes, Marvell, Browning, Yeats, Gide, Rilke, [[Ronald Firbank]], Nerval, [[Dashiell Hammett]], Reverdy, Valle-Inclán as well as figures more often found in his writings such as Eliot and Juan Ramón Jiménez. The dates of composition of the essays range from 1935 to 1963, so they cover the full range of his critical career. For students of Cernuda, the main interest lies in the first volume. Not only does it contain his heartfelt 1946 tribute to Andrė Gide but also "Palabras antes de una Lectura" and "Historial de un Libro", two of the most revealing accounts of his poetics and starting-points for all Cernuda criticism. "Palabras" was the text of a lecture delivered at the Lyceum Club in Madrid in 1935 and edited for publication in 1941. He begins by discussing the purpose of poetry, which for him is a question of conveying his personal experience of the world. It is in this lecture that he reveals his primary theme: reality versus desire. His aim is to find "a transcendental plane of existence where the division between the objective and the subjective dimensions of the world is eliminated"<ref name="Harris: Luis Cernuda 62">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 62</ref> and cosmic harmony can be attained. He makes a clear distinction between the world's deceptive appearance and the hidden "imagen completa del mundo",<ref name="Cernuda602">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Palabras antes p 602</ref> which is the true reality. He also develops the idea of a "daimonic power" that pervades the universe and is able to achieve this synthesis of the invisible underlying reality and its deceiving appearance. But a force powerful enough to do this is also capable of destroying the poet, as in the case of Hölderlin.<ref name="Cernuda605">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Palabras antes p 605</ref> The "Historial" was first published in instalments in ''México en la Cultura'' in 1958. It is a detailed account of Cernuda's intellectual development and gives great insight into the process of how he became a poet and how his poetry evolved over time. In a review in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Arthur Terry described it as "the most remarkable piece of self-analysis by any Spanish poet, living or dead".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Terry |first1=Arthur |title=Poesia y literatura |journal=Bulletin of Hispanic Studies |date=October 1961 |volume=38 |issue=4 |pages=287–288|doi=10.3828/bhs.38.4.287 }}</ref> It is, however, very reticent about his emotional development. For example, he only alludes very obliquely to the love affairs that inspired ''Los placeres prohibidos'', ''Donde habite el olvido'' and "Poemas para un cuerpo".