SOURCE: "Vicente Aleixandre's In a Vast Dominion: The Completion of a Submersion of Personality in the World Ground," in La Chispa '85: Selected Proceedings, edited by Gilbert Paolini, Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, 1985, pp. 153-62.

In the following essay, Hanak discusses several poems from In a Vast Dominion, especially "Antigua casa madrileña," in order to support his contention that Aleixandre endorses a mystical view of fulfillment through the individual's submersion into a collective unconscious.

In a Vast Dominion is the ninth cyclus of poems in the first volume of Aleixandre's Obras completas (1977). It first appeared under the title En un vasto dominio in 1962. The "vast dominion" in question is the spatiotemporal infinity of a strictly telluric dimension, the only true reality of existence. Space and time permeate each other without differentiation, for the here-and-now and the there-and-then are deceptive inventions of human self-consciousness that reveal...