Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Alberti and political commitment===

Alberti was another of the people whom he met for the first time in the Góngora celebrations in Seville in 1927.  Alberti describes him as "dark, thin, extremely refined and meticulous".<ref name=Alberti239>Alberti p. 239</ref>  However, it is not likely that Alberti ever became close to Cernuda although the latter contributed to many of the former's journals during the early 1930s.  Alberti invited him to contribute to the celebratory album that he was editing<ref name=Alberti242>Alberti p. 242</ref> but Cernuda did not follow it up.  His relationship with Alberti is suggestive of the pathways along which his mind was moving after his initial contact with surrealism.  In 1933, for example, he wrote for Alberti's magazine ''Octubre'' a piece called ''Los que se incorporan (Those who join up)''.  In it he calls for the destruction of bourgeois society:  "I trust in a revolution inspired by communism to achieve this".<ref name=Cernuda2_63>Cernuda OCP vol 2 Los que se incorporan p 63</ref>

In an article written for ''Hora de España'' in 1937, he wrote that: "the poet is inevitably a revolutionary... a revolutionary with full awareness of his responsibility".<ref name=Cernuda2121>Cernuda OCP vol 2 Líneas sobre los poetas y para los poetas en los días actuales p 121</ref>  However, by that time, it seems clear that he did not expect poets to get directly involved in revolutionary actions.  In an essay devoted to Aleixandre in 1950 he goes so far as to say that, for a poet to take the course of direct action "is absurd and tends to ruin the poet as a poet".<ref name="Cernuda2207">Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 207</ref>

This attitude seems to colour his response to Alberti's poetic output. A key point in Cernuda's view of Alberti's poetry is that Alberti seemed to lack any sense of self and his poetry lacks interiority.<ref name="Cernuda220">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 220</ref> He also highlights the fact that Alberti was a virtuoso versifier, able to counterfeit the manner of Gil Vicente or any other folk poet. Cernuda does not approve of the playfulness that Alberti shows in his first three collections.<ref name=Cernuda220 /> He does not believe that Alberti rises above the level of his models, such as Góngora and Guillén in ''Cal y canto'' - in other words he sees Alberti as a parodist rather than as an original poet.<ref name="Cernuda221">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 221</ref> The reader gets the impression that he envies the fact that Alberti became so successful so rapidly, using him as an example of a poet who found his public immediately.<ref name=Cernuda221 />  These thoughts were written in his essay in ''Estudios sobre poesía espaňola contemporánea'' on Alberti and seem to derive from Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", because he goes on to draw a contrast between writers who are readily accepted by the public with writers who are more original, who modify the tradition with their own experiences of life and who have to wait for the public to accept them. 
Cernuda ends up by praising his poetic fluency and virtuosity while stating that he had nothing to say and that his work is basically deprived of passion and emotion. Cernuda even wonders whether Alberti's recognition of the social injustice of Spain was the inspiration for him to write political poetry because it is difficult to see any fundamental change in his ideas and feelings.<ref name="Cernuda223">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Rafael Alberti p 223</ref> The political poems are not very different from his previous phase and he remains just as committed to traditional poetic forms as ever. Cernuda closes his essay by noting that Alberti's commitment to Communism does not stop him from turning to apolitical subject-matter in which the reader can divine nostalgia for his former success. In an attempt to revive this, he churns out variations of his old themes.