SOURCE: “Notes on Self-Transcendence East and West: Jorge Guillén and Haiku,” in Dieciocho, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 160-81.

In the following essay, Allen discusses several short poems by Guillén, asserting that he is the greatest Spanish poet of “transcendental consciousness.” Allen also compares the poetry of Guillén to the Japanese form of Haiku.

During the second half of this century we have seen an enormous growth in the literature on self-transcendence. The phenomena associated with “centered,” non-ego awareness have been described in a number of fields including ethnology, depth psychology, comparative religion, parapsychology, and the vast literature on meditative techniques.

Particularly important for the theoretical structure of non-ego consciousness is the current trend in parapsychology toward a synthesis of knowledge about the subject. The “spooky” Victorian interests of the old Society for Psychical Research (founded in 1882)—trance mediums, ghosts, and the like—have been left far...