Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

==Poetry==

Luis Cernuda was one of the most dedicated poets amongst the members of the Generation of 1927.<ref name=Connell202>Connell p 202</ref>   Salinas, Guillén, Diego and Dámaso Alonso were as well known for their teaching activities and their critical writings as for their poetry.  Altolaguirre and Prados are probably remembered more for their printing work than for their literary output.  Alberti enjoyed fame for his political activism and Lorca was possibly as gifted in drama and music as he was in poetry.  Cernuda drifted into university teaching simply as a way of earning a living and never held a prestigious post. Everything in his life was incidental to his work as a poet. His published criticism is valuable for the insights it gives into his development as a poet - he tends to discuss the authors and works that had most influence on his poetry and thinking. The development of his poetry from first to last is dictated by the development of his character and not by literary fashion - although his personal crisis, depicted in ''Un río, un amor'', does coincide with the personal crises experienced by Alberti, Lorca and Aleixandre.<ref name=Connell202 /> The collective title he chose for his poetry, ''La realidad y el deseo'', refers to the conflict that is its primary theme. He wrote:

<blockquote>Desire led me towards the reality that offered itself to my eyes as if only through possession of it might I be able to achieve certainty about my own life. But since I have only ever achieved a precarious grip on it, there comes the opposite tendency, that of hostility to the ironic attractiveness of reality...And so, in my view, the essence of the problem of poetry is the conflict between reality and desire, between appearance and truth, permitting us to achieve some glimpse of the complete image of the world that we do not know.<ref name="Cernuda602b">Cernuda OCP vol 1 Palabras antes de una lectura p 602</ref></blockquote>

A significant stage of his development occurred in 1923-24, when he was doing military service. Every afternoon, along with the other recruits, he had to ride round the outskirts of Seville. One afternoon, he had an epiphanic experience as if he were seeing things for the first time. He also felt an uncontrollable need to describe this experience. This led to the writing of a whole series of poems which have not survived.<ref name="Cernuda626">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 626</ref>
[[Image:The Chapel Emmanuel College2.jpg|thumb|Emmanuel College, Cambridge]]
Another crucial phase of his development was his residence in Great Britain between 1938 and 1947. He learned English and read widely in English literature. He seems to have had a sense that he was predestined to read English poetry and that it corrected and completed something that was lacking both in his poetry and in himself.<ref name="Cernuda645" /> He began to see his work in the classroom as analogous to the writing of poetry - the poet should not simply try to communicate the effect of an experience but to direct the reader to retrace the process by which the poet had come to experience what he is writing about. His attitude to Britain was ambivalent. He learned a lot from the literature and greatly admired certain aspects of the national character, as displayed in wartime, but found it hard to summon up affection for the country and its people.<ref name="Cernuda649-50">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 649-50</ref> He tried to sum up his ambivalent feelings in the poem "La partida", but he considered that he failed to do justice to the theme.<ref name="Cernuda653">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 653</ref>

===Collections===

====Primeras poesías (1924–1927)====

This was the title that Cernuda gave in ''La realidad y el deseo'' to the revised version of his first published work ''Perfil del aire'', which had been published by ''Litoral'' in April 1927. The collection was dedicated to Salinas, and Cernuda sent a copy to him in Madrid, where he was spending the university vacation. Cernuda later recalled that this book was greeted by a stream of hostile reviews that tended to concentrate on a perceived lack of novelty and on its indebtedness to Guillén. It also really stung him that Salinas merely sent back a brief acknowledgement of receipt of the book.<ref name=Cernuda629>Cernuda OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 629</ref> He dealt with the apparent debt to Guillén in an open letter published in ''Ínsula'' in 1948, in which he points out that in 1927 Guillén had yet to publish a collection. During the 1920s, Guillén had published individual poems in various magazines - including 12 in two separate editions of the ''Revista de Occidente'' in 1924 and 1925 - but, he argues, this is scarcely sufficient evidence to demonstrate significant influence, given that in December 1925 he himself had had 9 poems published in ''Revista de Occidente''. His conclusion is that both of them shared an interest in pure poetry and were influenced by the works of Mallarmé - in the case of Guillén this influence was transmitted via Valéry.<ref name=Cernuda607>Cernuda OCP vol 1 El crítico, el amigo y el poeta p 607-624</ref> Villena, writing in 1984, sees these poems as the result of the spread in the 1920s of the ideal of "pure poetry" as espoused by figures such as Valéry, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega y Gasset in his influential essay ''La deshumanización del arte''. The young poets of the era, including Guillén, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Prados, Lorca and Cernuda, were all influenced by this blend of classical purity and refined playfulness and Guillén was the ring-leader.  It was not so much a case of influence as a common, shared aesthetic.<ref name=Villena14>Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 14</ref> The reviews were not all hostile. [[José Bergamín]], for example, published a favourable review and Guillén himself sent him a letter praising the work and urging him to ignore the reviews.<ref name=Villena15>Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 15</ref> Juan Guerrero Ruiz, the secretary of Juan Ramón Jiménez, also sent him a letter full of praise.<ref name=Epistolario50>Epistolario Letter from Juan Guerrero Ruiz May 3, 1927 p 50</ref> Nevertheless, he was never able to forget the criticism that this work had engendered. He was too thin-skinned for that.

The revision process removed ten poems and also some of the stylistic elements that might have triggered comparisons to Guillén - such as the use of exclamations and the rhetorical device apostrophe - but in reality the poets are very different in tone. Guillén reaches out joyfully and confidently to reality whereas Cernuda is more hesitant - the world might be an exciting place but something holds him back.<ref name=Connell203 /> Like Guillén, Cernuda uses strict metrical forms in this collection, such as the ''décima'' and the sonnet, and there is also an intellectual quality far removed from the folkloric elements that were being used by poets such as Alberti and Lorca, but the emotional restraint is far removed from the world of ''Cántico''. The change of title suggests a recent desire to strip artifice away from his poetry,<ref name="Cernuda630">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 630</ref> presumably this refers to the reference in the title to the street where he had grown up - the Calle del Aire - which had baffled Francisco Ayala, one of the negative reviewers.<ref name=Taravillo126>Taravillo: Cernuda - Años españoles p 126</ref> There are already poems that reject the real world in favour of a love that will lead to oblivion. The poet wants to find a place to hide from the world of reality, fully aware that such a retreat or escape can only be temporary.<ref name=Connell203>Connell p 203</ref> The overriding mood is one of adolescent melancholy. The debt to Juan Ramón Jiménez is also strong.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio">Harris intro to Un río, un amor etc p 13</ref> :)

====Egloga, Elegía, Oda (1927–1928)====

After the set-back of the critical reception of ''Perfil del aire'', Cernuda decided to cultivate precisely those things that had been criticised, especially the lack of novelty. He wrote an eclogue, heavily influenced by his favourite Spanish poet [[Garcilaso de la Vega (poet)|Garcilaso]]. This was published in the first issue of a magazine called ''Carmen'' and was received very favourably by [[Salvador de Madariaga]]. This was followed by an elegy and then by an ode. Although he came to recognise that writing these poems had helped his technical fluency, he realised that there was something essential that these formal exercises did not allow him to express.<ref name="Cernuda631">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 631</ref> However, he was encouraged to learn that it was possible to write poems of much greater length than was customary at that time, which was an important discovery for him. In ''Historial de un libro'', he states that at this time he was trying to find an [[objective correlative]] for what he was experiencing - one of the many indications of the influence of [[TS Eliot]] on his work, although this is a rationalisation after the fact because he had yet to read Eliot.<ref name="Cernuda632"/>

This small group of poems can be read as Cernuda's participation in the Góngora tercentenary celebrations - except that he chose to evoke the memories of Garcilaso's eclogues and Luis de León's odes possibly as a way to signal his individuality and his independence from fashion.<ref name="Poesia completa51">Derek Harris: Introduction to Poesía completa p 51</ref> However, their influence is evident only on the form of these poems - the subject-matter is more obviously influenced by Mallarmé. The languorous mood recalls "L'après-midi d'un Faune". There are hints of the poet's admiration for Greek mythology and also of his interest in male physical beauty which would be developed in later collections.<ref name=Connell203 /> Luis de León was a lasting interest. His essay included in ''Poesía y literatura'' shows that Cernuda considered him to be a kindred spirit; someone for whom poetry was a refuge or means of escape from the trials and difficulties of everyday life; someone who was always trying to find a way to gain access to a realm of harmony.<ref name="Cernuda493">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Poesía y literatura p 493</ref>

====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''.

====Los placeres prohibidos (1931)====

The poems gathered in this and the previous collection came to Cernuda fully formed. The poems that eventually got published were the same as the first drafts, which was very different from his experience with his first two collections.<ref name="Cernuda637">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 637</ref> It is a book of love, rebellion and beauty.<ref name=Villena19/>

The poet's homosexuality is made defiantly manifest in this collection. However, the title of the work suggests that there were other "forbidden pleasures" and he explores various ways of defying the norms of bourgeois behaviour.  It is the product of an intensive period of literary production between April and June 1931, when Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio85">Harris notes to Un río etc p 85</ref>  In "Diré cómo nacisteis", Cernuda launches a war cry against a society in decay that represses and imprisons people who transgress the social norms of love.  And in the next poem, "Telarañas cuelgan de la razón", he sets up the other major mood of the collection, an elegiac mood of sorrow.<ref name="Harris notes to Un rio89">Harris notes to Un río etc p 89</ref> The poems in this book draw a distinction between the poet's freedom of imagination and the accepted rules of life that confine and limit his freedom.<ref name=Connell205>Connell p 205</ref>  The predominant tone is one of desolation, recalling the transitory nature of love and the emptiness it leaves in its wake.  In "De qué país", Cernuda looks at a newborn child and depicts the betrayal of his sense of wonder and innocence by the way the adult world imposes artificial codes of behaviour and a sense of guilt when the code is transgressed.  It is a theme that is explored many times in his oeuvre.

====Donde habite el olvido (1932–1933)====

This book resulted from a love affair that ended badly.  When the collection was first published, by the ''Signo'' publishing house, nobody noticed the significance of a large "S" in the form of a snake on the inside back cover.<ref name="Taravillo1303">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 303</ref>  Derek Harris identified the other man as Serafín Fernández Ferro<ref name="Poesia completa" /> a young man from a poor family in [[La Coruña]] who led a picaresque life and insinuated himself into the artistic circles of Madrid in early 1931, aged 16.  Biographical data for him is scanty, fragmented and often confusing.  In 1945, he appeared in [[Malraux]]'s film [[Espoir: Sierra de Teruel]] and then emigrated to Mexico, where he died in 1954.<ref name="Taravillo1238">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 238</ref> Cernuda probably met him in April 1931 and fell head over heels in love. This led to the flood of creativity that resulted in ''Los placeres prohibidos'', the majority of which was written between April 13 and 30.<ref name="Taravillo1229">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 229</ref> The relationship quickly soured. Serafín was both promiscuous and bisexual, which led to jealousy on the part of Cernuda, he used to ask his lover for money and was generally manipulative. There were occasional violent rows between them.<ref name="Taravillo1257">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 257</ref> Some of the atmosphere of their relationship is described in "Aprendiendo olvido", one of the prose poems included in ''Ocnos''. By June 1932, their relationship was finished.<ref name="Taravillo1259">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 259</ref>

In later years, Cernuda was embarrassed by the candour with which he wrote about it in ''Donde habite'', attributing this to the slowness of his emotional development, and admitted that this section of his oeuvre was one of the least-satisfying for him.<ref name="Cernuda639">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 639</ref>

In this collection, Cernuda steps away from surrealism, feeling that what was lying around hidden in the depths of his subconscious had been dredged sufficiently. Instead of what he had come to see as the artifice and triviality of hermetic images deriving from the flow of thoughts through the poet's mind, he turned to the example of the 19thc. poet [[Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer]], who produced tightly controlled poetry on the subject of lost love.<ref name="Cernuda639" /> Cernuda continued to eschew rhyme and assonance but, like Bécquer's ''Rimas'' the stanzas are short and self-contained and their language is restrained.<ref name=Connell206>Connell p 206</ref> Sometimes, the poems return to the world of the ''Primeras poesías''.

The first poem alludes obliquely to Serafín, the archangel who is named explicitly in a later poem "Mi arcángel". The ''leit-motiv'' of the angel recurs in "II" and in "XII", among others.<ref name="Taravillo1258">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 258</ref> In "III", the theme is the emptiness left by the passing of love - just as in "Telarañas cuelgan de la razón" from ''Los placeres prohibidos'' - but rendered in a much simpler, more lyrical fashion. "IV" shows how the dreams and aspirations of youth are destroyed when they soar too high - probably a reference to the myth of Icarus. "VII" returns to the enclosed world of the early poems, suggesting that despite all his experiences the poet is still an unfulfilled dreamer. "XII" suggests that love alone makes life real. It persists as a universal force even though it might have died in a particular individual.<ref name=Connell206 /> The ideas behind surrealism are still present, although the presentation of them is markedly different.

This love affair had a lasting effect on Cernuda. He alludes to it in "Apologia pro vita sua" in ''Como quien espera el alba'' and also in a short story written in 1937, right in the midst of the Civil War - "Sombras en el salón".<ref name="Taravillo1253">Taravillo Luis Cernuda vol 1 Años españoles p 253</ref>

====Invocaciones (1934–1935)====

This collection was originally called ''Invocaciones a las gracias del mundo'' but Cernuda later shortened it to make it seem less pompous. Tired with the habitual brevity of poems in the tradition of [[Antonio Machado]] or Jiménez, he starts to write much longer poems than hitherto. When he started work on these poems, he realised that their subject-matter needed greater length for him to be able to express everything he needed to say about them. He cast off all the remaining traces of "pure" poetry.<ref name="Cernuda640">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 640</ref> He also notes, however, that there is a tendency to ramble at the beginning of certain poems in this book as well as a degree of bombast.

His principal subject-matter is still essentially himself and his thoughts but he starts to view things in a more objective way: the poetry is more analytical. For example, in "Soliloquio del farero", the poet finds an escape from desperation in an enclosed and solitary world very similar to that of his earliest poems. The poem is addressed to his "friend" - solitude - and he develops the idea that he has been chosen to serve mankind in some way by being separated from them, just like a lighthouse-keeper. Other poems in the collection allude to Greek mythology or a golden age of innocence that has been lost.<ref name=Connell206 /> Early in 1935, at the height of his relationship with Stanley Richardson, Cernuda dedicated "Por unos tulipanes amarillos" to him.<ref name="Stanley Richardson and Spain" />

====Las nubes (1937–1940)====

This collection was written during the Spanish Civil War and amidst all the disruption and uncertainty in Cernuda's life as he went into exile, drifting from Madrid, to London, to Paris, to Cranleigh and finally to Glasgow. It is a book about war and exile and how both of these connect with Spain. It is his most Spanish collection a nd a pivotal collection in his output.<ref name=Villena27>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 27</ref> Meditations about his isolation in foreign countries and about Spain, particularly about his growing feeling that nothing in Spain was going to change for the better and that intolerance, ignorance and superstition were winning the struggle,<ref name=Cernuda642 /> are the major themes. There is a dichotomy in the way he views Spain. On the one hand is Spain the stepmother of whom he is ashamed, stuck in the past, jealous, intolerant, violent and now wrecked by war, as depicted in "Elegía española I". On the other hand is an idealised version of Spain, now destroyed, to which Cernuda feels allegiance. It is a mix of a lost Eden of the south (the Spain of his Andalusian background), a tolerant, creative, great and respected nation and of the most positive and creative aspects of Golden Age Spain. This Spain is depicted in "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra", "Elegía española II" and other poems.<ref name=Villena28-29>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 28-29</ref> Exile is a theme that Cernuda will keep developing for the rest of his poetic career. Physical exile reminds the poet that he is also a spiritual exile in the world, a cursed figure because every poet belongs to a purer realm of experience, as he had already started to write about in ''Invocaciones''.<ref name=Villena29>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 29</ref> "Scherzo para un elfo" and "Gaviotas en el parque" are just two of the explorations of this theme

Stylistically, there is an increased concentration on clarity and simplicity of diction and his control over his means of expression is growing.<ref name=Connell207 />  He often uses combinations of 7 and 11 syllable lines, the basic form of the ''silva'', a very important form for poets of both the [[Spanish Golden Age]] and the [[Generation of '98|Generation of 1898]]. The collections prior to 'Las Nubes' were intimate and abstract. In ''Invocaciones'' he adds symbolic elements but now his poetry takes on greater amplitude with the addition of reflections on culture, mythology, history and his biography. He starts to write dramatic monologues and to work towards a more conversational style of poetry, under the influences of Wordsworth and Browning.<ref name=Villena31-32>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 31-32</ref>

When he left Madrid in February 1938, he took eight new poems with him.<ref name="Cernuda645"/> In London, he wrote six more. He wrote "Lázaro" while [[Neville Chamberlain|Chamberlain]] and [[Hitler]] were negotiating over Czechoslovakia, and the poem is written in a mood of melancholy calm, trying to express the disenchanted surprise that a dead man might feel on being brought back to life.<ref name="Cernuda646">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 646</ref> Cernuda was feeling a growing sense of detachment and this is one of the first examples of his characteristic use of a ''Doppelgänger'' to express, in this case, his sense of alienation and lifelessness.<ref name="Harris: a study149">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 149</ref>

During his stay with the colony of evacuated Basque children at Eaton Hastings, he befriended a boy called Iñaki who had quickly mastered English and showed such promise that Lord Faringdon was prepared to finance his education at a private school - an offer refused by the boy on political grounds, according to the story told by Cernuda to his fellow émigré Rafael Martínez Nadal. Shortly afterwards, the boy fell ill and was taken to the [[Radcliffe Infirmary]]. On March 27, he was close to death. He refused the last sacraments and turned away from the crucifix held out by a priest. He wanted to see Cernuda, however, and asked him to read a poem. He then turned to the wall and died. This was the inspiration for the poem "Niño muerto", written in May 1938.<ref name="Murphy: Pub Poets"/>

A key poem in the collection is "A Larra, con unas violetas (1837-1937)", in which he identifies himself with [[Mariano José de Larra]], the brilliant, satirical journalist of 19thc. Madrid. Larra was a fierce critic of the governments of his day and of the state of Spanish society but was at heart very patriotic. Cernuda sees in Larra a kindred spirit, embittered, misunderstood, isolated and unsuccessful in love.<ref name=Connell207>Connell p 207</ref>

====Como quien espera el alba (1941–1944)====

This work was begun during his 1941 vacation in Oxford, continued in Glasgow and completed at Cambridge in 1944. The autumn, winter and spring of 1941-2 was one of the most fertile periods of his life and it seems that this collection was one of his favourites.<ref name="Cernuda648" /> He read widely in English poetry and criticism and made acquaintance with the writings of TS Eliot, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Keats's letters amongst others.<ref name="Cernuda647"/> He also began to read Goethe and Kierkegaard.<ref name="Cernuda649" /> Whilst this extensive reading does not show through specifically in any poem, his handling of longer poems is more assured.<ref name=Connell207 /> There are poems that suggest a nostalgia for the Seville of his youth - not an emotion that Cernuda often displays, but a longing for bright sunshine and warmth is easily explicable in the circumstances. It is only in such indirect ways that a reader can sense what was happening around him. Glasgow was bombed 5 times by the [[Luftwaffe]] in [[the Blitz]] and suffered extensive damage but it would be impossible to gather this from reading Cernuda. However, this collection does include "Por otros tulipanes amarillos" an elegy to his former lover Stanley Richardson dead in an air raid on London, which echoes an earlier tribute published in ''Invocaciones''.

In an extended poem, "Noche del hombre y su demonio", he reflects on the course of his life and the possibility of being remembered after his death.<ref name=Connell208>:Connell p 208</ref> The ''demonio'' attacks the concept of the poet's vocation and suggests that Cernuda might sometimes have been tempted to try to live a normal life. However, the poet fights back by saying that his poetic vocation is what justifies his life and gives it whatever meaning it might have. Even though he might be wrong or suffering from a delusion, his poetry is absolutely necessary to him and he must commit to it totally.<ref name="Harris A Study117">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 117</ref>

"Góngora" is another poem that takes a historical figure and projects the poet's own psychological state onto him. The poem seems to be a development from a set of notes he made in 1937 and collected under the title ''Góngora y el gongorismo''.<ref name=OCP2137>OCP vol 2 Góngora y el gongorismo p 137</ref> He sees Góngora as a victim of society and surveys the humiliation and incomprehension from which he suffered when alive, the lack of respect accorded to him by critics and his eventual rehabilitation from neglect in 1927.<ref name="Harris A Study110">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 110</ref> In these notes, he briefly discusses a recently published work on Góngora by Dámaso Alonso, which discusses the two types of poetry that Góngora wrote - complex and elaborate works such as "Polifemo" or the "Soledades" as against artless ballads and sonnets. In Cernuda's view, however, there is only one poet and the critic ought to try to resolve these two opposing tendencies and demonstrate them as aspects of a single truth.<ref name=OCP2143>:OCP vol 2 Góngora y el gongorismo p 143</ref> It is characteristic of Cernuda to resist the way society tries to appropriate and sanitise the poet, while showing disdain to him while he was alive. He expresses this resistance with great power and bitter irony in the poem<blockquote><poem>
Ventaja grande es que esté ya muerto
Y que de muerto cumpla los tres siglos, que así pueden
Los descendientes mismos de quienes le insultaban
Inclinarse a su nombre, dar premio al erudito,
Sucesor del gusano, royendo su memoria.</poem>

(it is a great advantage that he is now dead and that he lasted three centuries dead, for now the very descendants of those who insulted him may bow to his name, give a prize to the scholar, successor to the worm, gnawing away at his memory)</blockquote>

The title of the collection alludes to the atmosphere of Britain during the Second World War when "it was only possible to hope for an end to the world's retreat into a primitive world of darkness and terror, in the middle of which England was like the ark in which Noah survived the flood."<ref name="Cernuda649"/>

====Vivir sin estar viviendo (1944–1949)====

Begun in Cambridge, continued in London and completed in America, this is very similar to the previous collection in that it contains a mix of introspective and self-analytical works and shorter impressionist poems. As a result of his reading of Hölderlin, Cernuda had started to use [[enjambement]]. His increasing use of this device gave his poetry a duality of rhythm - the rhythm of the individual line and the rhythm of the phrase. Since he tended not to use rhyme or even assonance and was not very interested in writing poetry with a marked metrical pattern, the rhythm of the line tends to be swamped by that of the phrase, resulting in an effect that is often close to prose.<ref name="Cernuda650">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 650</ref> It is a rhythm of ideas rather than a metrical rhythm. And yet, the influence of Hölderlin dates back to the period when he was writing ''Invocaciones'' in the mid-1930s, which gives a sense of how profound the influence was. The German poet gave him an example of "a poetic language using long sense periods in extensive poems that develop a theme in depth"<ref name="Harris A Study67">Harris: Luis Cernuda A Study of the Poetry p 67</ref> and over time the reader can see Cernuda absorbing and building on this example.

The first eight poems were written in Cambridge and he added another 13 which he wrote during holidays in Cornwall. The title alludes to the state of mind in which he found himself at that time - living vicariously in foreign countries where he scarcely knew anybody. His voracious reading was taking the place of living. He could see nothing ahead of him but death.<ref name="Cernuda656" /> A typical poem from this collection is "El César", which is another use of the ''Doppelgänger'' motif.  The aged Emperor Tiberius in retirement in his palace on Capri ponders his solitude and voluntary separation from the world and people. His feeling of misanthropy is almost idealised.<ref name=Villena37>Villena: intro to Las nubes p 37</ref> He reflects on his power, his age, the blood he has shed, the rumours that circulate about him, his regrets and guilty feelings, what it is like to be an old man desirous of youthful flesh. It is a complex poem: Caesar is a projection of Cernuda's thoughts and yet he is also a figure in his own right, reflecting on his own life story.

====Con las horas contadas (1950–1956)====

This collection was started in Mount Holyoke during the winter of 1950 and completed in Mexico. One of the most noteworthy things about this book is that it contains a group of 16 poems - "Poemas para un cuerpo" - about an intensely physical affair he had with an unidentified man in Mexico. The title of the collection suggests not merely Cernuda's obsession with the passing of time but also the sense of strangeness he felt whilst living this amorous adventure - an old man in love as he describes himself.<ref name="Cernuda658">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 658</ref> As already stated, this was one of the happiest periods in his life. Some of the poems refer to the experiences he felt during the affair but the majority are reflections after the affair ended, attempts to explain and fix this experience of intense love.  There are obvious parallels with ''Donde habite el olvido'' but these later poems are not bitter, resentful or disillusioned.  Cernuda "is primarily concerned to investigate the relationship between himself and the experience of love, so much so in fact that the loved one has only a secondary importance in the poems".<ref name="Harris: a study140">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 140</ref> However, he is, unlike Serafín Fernández Ferro or Stanley Richardson, present in the poems rather than a shadow or absence.<ref name="Villena 39">Villena: intro to Las Nubes p 39</ref> The poems lack sensuality. Poem "IV Sombra de mí", for example, "is a meditation on the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The loved one is again the visible image of the lover's desire but nonetheless necessary for without him love could not have been exteriorised."<ref name="Harris: a study143">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 143</ref> What we get is a sense of the poet's gratitude for having been given the chance to experience love. It is interesting that although Cernuda later expressed his affection for these poems he acknowledges that they give cause to one of the most serious objections that can be made to his work: that he was not always able to maintain the distance between the man who suffers and the poet who creates.<ref name="Cernuda660"/>

The bulk of the poems in the collection are shorter than in previous books and start to incorporate assonance more frequently in an attempt to concentrate the thematic material rather than explore it at length and also to seem more purely lyrical, even though these urges were not the result of a conscious decision.<ref name=Cernuda658 />

Among the other interesting poems is the one that opens the collection, "Aguila y rosa", a very sober, restrained account of the unfortunate marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor, and Philip's stay in Britain. At times, it could be that Cernuda is projecting his own feelings onto the king. Brief and ultimately tragic as their married life was, at least the love she experienced gave Mary some recompense for her unhappy life.<ref name="Harris: a study138">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 138</ref> With this poem, Cernuda completed a trilogy of works about Philip II. The first was "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra" in ''Las nubes'', followed by "Silla del rey" from ''Vivir sin estar viviendo''. Both of these poems evoke the building of the monastery-palace at [[El Escorial]]. In the first poem, the monastery becomes a symbol of the visionary, idealist, eternal Spain that Cernuda loved.<ref name="Villena 131">Villena: notes to Las Nubes p 131</ref> It is an image of beauty, the creation of a sensibility that despises the practical and is diametrically opposed to the utilitarian environment of Glasgow, the place where he lives in exile. The nightingale singing its song, just to please itself, is a symbol for Cernuda the poet and it becomes fused with his conception of El Escorial.<ref name="Harris: a study100-1">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 100-101</ref> "Silla del rey" depicts Philip watching the construction of his palace from his seat in the hills above. Cernuda takes as a starting point the king's thoughts of the building as the expression of his faith and centralising political ideas. This develops into a reflection on his work, time and society and leads to a declaration that he is creating a haven from the world, protected by spiritual power from temporal change. Reality and desire have become one. The king is an outlet for Cernuda himself.<ref name="Harris: a study102">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 102</ref>

"El elegido" is an objective account of the choosing, preparation and killing of an Aztec sacrificial victim. It is recounted in very simple language but it clearly picks up on the thoughts behind the soliloquy in ''Invocaciones''. The poem presents an allegory of the choosing, beguilement and final destruction of the poet by life or the "daimonic" power.<ref name=Connell208 />

====Desolación de la Quimera (1956–1962)====

Cernuda's last book of poems is a summing up of his career. It was published in Mexico in November 1962.<ref name="Poesia completa" /> It mingles poems in the style of his first book with epigrammatic works and extended reveries in his mature style. In "Niño tras un cristal", he completes a cycle of poems about the unawareness and hope of a child before its corruption by the world - a theme present right from the start of his poetic career.<ref name=Connell208 /> In addition there are poems that are derived from song-titles or catch-phrases - "Otra vez, con sentimiento" - and historical poems about figures such as Mozart, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Keats, Goethe, Ludwig of Bavaria. There is also a poem about a painting by [[Titian]],"''Ninfa y pastor'', por Ticiano". It is as if Cernuda has a need to base his experiences of life on a foundation of cultural references.<ref name="Villena introduction46">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 46</ref> Stylistically, this is an extreme collection. There no lyrical flights, no expansive metaphors. However, in the view of Luis Antonio de Villena, this dry language is exactly right for these ironic, cutting but perfectly chiselled poems.<ref name="Villena introduction52">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 52</ref>

It is clear that he knew that his life was coming to a close and he wanted to settle his accounts. This is shown by the titles of poems such as "Antes de irse", "Dos de noviembre", "Del otro lado", "Epílogo" and "Despedida". There are direct links to previous collections. For example, "Epílogo" is explicitly related to the "Poemas para un cuerpo", and "Pregunta vieja, vieja respuesta" links back to ''Donde habite el olvido''.<ref name="Villena introduction43">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 43</ref>

He also returns to the theme of Spain, which had first appeared in ''Las nubes'', analysing what he admires and dislikes.<ref name="Villena introduction44">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 44</ref> In "Díptico español", he shows his contempt for the intolerance, stupidity and cruelty of the Spanish society of his era. He is a Spaniard despite himself: he has no choice in the matter. However, he is proud of Spanish culture as exemplified by the works of [[Benito Pérez Galdós]] and [[Miguel de Cervantes]]: he is nostalgic not so much for the reality of Spain as for the idealised world created by Spanish literature.<ref name="Villena introduction45">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 45</ref> There are poems about other poets he knew, sometimes splenetic in tone. As usual, the major theme is that of the impossibility of finding happiness in a world where desire and reality diverge - cf "Hablando a Manona", "Luna llena en Semana Santa", or "Música cautiva".<ref name="Villena introduction55">Villena intro to Las Nubes etc p 55</ref> However, he does find some kind of consolation in the realm of art - listening to Mozart's music, or considering the world of Goethe compared with that of Napoleon's drunken soldiers.<ref name="Villena introduction55" /> Also, by this time, he had gathered some degree of fame in Spain and there were signs that people were responding to his writings. In "Peregrino", he reacts to enquiries about whether he might return to his homeland in a characteristically grumpy way which shades into a tone of resolute stoicism as he explains that he is driven to keep moving forward and can never return to the past.<ref name=Connell209>Connell p 209</ref>

===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 />

===Poetics: the role of the poet and poetry===

Cernuda's poetry shows a continual process of stripping away artifice and fashionable stylistic traits or mannerisms. This accounts in part for the abrupt changes in style and tone between various collections. He was also convinced that a poet needs to gain as much variety of experience and knowledge as possible, otherwise his work will be pallid and restricted.<ref name="Cernuda639" /> A poet's work should reflect his growth, his intellectual and emotional development.

When he describes things, it is his individual perception of them that he is trying to convey, what they mean to him, rather than their objective existence. However, after his early collections, he rarely uses the first-person. He frequently tries to create a sense of distance from his poetry by using the "tú" form but the person he is addressing is usually himself. The effect of this is that much of his poetry seems to be a self-conscious interior monologue.<ref name="Gibbons intro 13" /> In part, this is because he was always conscious of a difference between the Cernuda who lived and suffered and the Cernuda who wrote poetry.<ref name=Cernuda625 /> In part, it is also probably a result of his natural reticence and caution against disclosing too much of himself, despite the fact that personal history lies behind much of his output. Whereas Browning might use a figure such as [[Fra Lippo Lippi (poem)|Fra Lippo Lippi]] or [[Andrea del Sarto (poem)|Andrea del Sarto]] to live imaginatively what he would not present as his own experience, Cernuda's characters have Cernuda's voice and present versions or aspects of his own thoughts and feelings.<ref name="Gibbons intro 13">Gibbons intro to Selected Poems p 13</ref>

He was convinced that he was driven by an inner daimon to write poetry and that the poet is in touch with a spiritual dimension of life that normal people are either blind to or shut off from.<ref name=Cernuda604>Cernuda OCP vol 1 Palabras antes de una lectura p 604</ref> it is a topic which he alludes to frequently in his critical writings. His urge to write poetry was not under his control. Reading some lines of poetry, hearing some notes of music, seeing an attractive person could be the external influence that led to a poem but what was important was to try to express the real, deep-lying poetic impulse, which was sometimes powerful enough to make him shiver or burst into tears.<ref name="Cernuda638">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 638</ref>

Although he was a self-absorbed person, dedicated to the art of writing poetry, he was vulnerable enough to need to know that he had an audience. After November 1947, when an edition of ''Como quien espera el alba'' was published in Buenos Aires, rumours of its favourable reception reached him in Mount Holyoke. He was gratified to learn that he was starting to find an audience and that his name was getting mentioned when Spanish poetry was discussed.<ref name="Cernuda655" />