SOURCE: “Jorge Guillén,” in The Siren and the Seashell, University of Texas Press, 1976, pp. 153-60.

In the following essay, Paz discusses the significance of Guillén's poetry to modern Spanish literature.

Jorge Guillén occupies a central place in modern Spanish poetry. It is central in a paradoxical way: his work is an island, yet at the same time it is the bridge uniting the survivors of Modernism and the Generation of '98 to the Generation of 1925. His three great predecessors, who conceived of the poem as meditation (Unamuno), exclamation (Jiménez), or word in time (Machado), surely looked upon the appearance of his first works as heresy. Machado, at least, spoke out. In an article in 1929, after welcoming “the recent admirable books of Jorge Guillén and Pedro Salinas,” he added:

These poets—perhaps Guillén more than Salinas—tend to leap like bullfighters into that...