SOURCE: "Rhetorical Strategy in the Surrealist Poetry of Vicente Aleixandre," in Denver Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 21-6.

In the following essay, Garrison provides a close reading of the poem "Vida" in order to demonstrate that Aleixandre employs a definite rhetorical strategy in his surrealist poetry, imbuing irrational images with an intrinsic, palpable coherence.

On the inadequacy of commentary on Aleixandre:

Due to the supposed obscurity of his text, critical approaches to Vicente Aleixandre have remained tentative, at times even fearful. Rarely do we encounter analyses that rise above generalized thematic explorations or sporadic stylistic commentaries. For over fifty years critics have suggested a hidden coherence to Aleixandre while evading in-depth, concrete explications of individual poems…. Such collective approaches, although not without merit, have tended to devalue specific interpretations that may open Aleixandre's text to new possibilities. To compound this problem, and perhaps as a result, critics have...