SOURCE: “Jorge Guillén: The Quest for Precision,” inModern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 3, 1995, pp. 659-72.

In the following essay, Harvey examines Guillén's Aire nuestro, asserting that “precision” is the overriding characteristic of Guillén's poems. Harvey also compares Guillén's poetry to that of his contemporary Juan Ramón Jiménez.

          ¡Intelijencia, dame el nombre exacto de las cosas!           Que mi palabra sea la cosa misma, creada por mi alma nuevamente. 

(Juan Ramón Jiménez)¹

Jorge Guillén's poetic output, spanning fifty-five years from the first edition of Cántico in 1928 to Final in 1983, has engendered a vast amount of criticism, using approaches which range from comparisons of his poetry with Valéry's poésie pure to interpretations based on phenomenological analysis. However, this criticism has not exhausted the subject and in particular two key areas seem to have been largely neglected.

First, despite Guill...