Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Salinas and Guillén===

He came to the attention of Pedro Salinas in his first year at Seville University - 1920-21 - and recorded, as late as 1958, that he would probably never have found his vocation as a poet had it not been for the older man's encouragement.<ref name="Cernuda627"/> However, his attitude towards Salinas seems to have been quite complex, as far as can be judged from his writings. In 1929 and 1930, his growing political militancy, inspired by his attraction to surrealism, made it difficult for him to tolerate friends whom he had come to consider bourgeois - such as Guillén, Salinas and even Aleixandre.<ref name="Cernuda637" /> Even though he might have reverted to friendly terms with Salinas and Guillén (and this was right at the start of his relationship with Aleixandre, when he viewed him as a comfortable bourgeois), in a collection of essays published in 1957, ''Estudios sobre Poesía española contemporánea'', it is possible to see that he continues to view them as adhering to a different conception of poetry. For Cernuda, a true poet has to break away from society in some way, even if he might live a lifestyle that looks totally conventional from the outside, and these two poets never managed to do that.<ref name="Cernuda196">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 196</ref> He does not approve of the playful qualities in Salinas's poetry and his seeming refusal to deal with profound subjects.<ref name="Cernuda197">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 197</ref> When he considers the change that came over Salinas's poetry with ''La voz a ti debida'', he dismisses it as

<blockquote>just another game, a desire to show that he was as human as the next man.<ref name="Cernuda199">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 199</ref></blockquote>

In truth, the poetry of Salinas was alien to Cernuda - so alien as to be antipathetic to him.  His personal relationship with Salinas had probably never fully recovered from the blow of his apparent rejection of ''Perfil del aire'' in 1927.  Not even his favourable review of the first edition of ''La realidad y el deseo'' seems to have appeased Cernuda for long.  Salinas wrote an introduction to an anthology of Spanish poetry that was published in the 1940s and referred to Cernuda as ''el más Licenciado Vidriera de los poetas'', an allusion to the Cervantes short story ''[[El licenciado Vidriera]]'', in which the hero retreats timorously from life under the delusion that he is made of glass.  In a poem called "Malentendu", included in ''Desolación de la Quimera'', Cernuda launches a bitter attack on a man who, he claims, consistently misunderstood and ill-treated him, alluding specifically to that description.{{cn|date=October 2022}}

His contacts with Guillén seem to have been more sporadic.  Cernuda clearly valued his supportive words when ''Perfil del aire'' first appeared and he does not seem to have done anything to vex Cernuda.  However the latter's assessment is based solely on the evidence of ''Cántico'' - the later collections had not begun to appear when Cernuda wrote about him.  Clearly, the poet who wrote in "Beato sillón" that

<blockquote><poem>
El mundo está bien
Hecho
</poem></blockquote>

has a different view of reality than Cernuda.  Nevertheless, Cernuda respects his dedication to his poetry and his commitment to revising it and making it better.  However, he does regret that Guillén should have expended so much care and energy on expounding such a limited view of life.<ref name="Cernuda203">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 203</ref>  He notes what he views as Guillén's tendency to draw everything he sees into a contained, bourgeois viewpoint.<ref name="Cernuda202">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 202</ref>  He also notes the way that when Guillén writes about Lorca, the latter's life and works become a personal affair of the Guillén family.  His assessment ends in a contradictory way.  He views Guiillén as a poet in the manner of [[Coventry Patmore]] - a now forgotten 19thc. British poet - and yet also one of the 3 or 4 finest poets of his generation.<ref name="Cernuda205">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Salinas y Guillén p 205</ref>