SOURCE: "Vicente Aleixandre, Last of the Romantics: The 1977 Nobel Prize for Literature," in World Literature Today, Vol. 52, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 203-08.

Durán is a Spanish-born educator, critic, and poet who has published books on many Spanish and Latin American writers, including Pablo Neruda, Miguel de Cervantes, José Ortega y Gasset, Amado Nervo, Luis de León, and Francisco Quevedo. In the following overview of Aleixandre's career, Durán perceives a Romantic strain in the poet's verse.

Why Aleixandre? More explicitly, why should the Nobel Prize for Literature be awarded to Vicente Aleixandre in 1977? Barbara Walters, speaking through a nationwide television program, declared that the poet was virtually unknown outside his native Spain (which only proves the lack of intellectual preparedness of our television announcers). And yet, if Lorca had been alive today, there is no question that the prize would have been his. The prize belongs not...