SOURCE: “Music as Order in the Poetry of Jorge Guillén,” inPerspectives on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 10, 1984, pp. 66-74.

In the following essay, Miller discusses the themes of music and musicality as representative of cosmic order in Guillén's poetry.

The duality of chaos and order plays a significant role in the poetry of Jorge Guillén, as various critics, as well as Guillén himself, have noted. The trajectory of his poetic development over time reflects this duality, with the harmony predominant in Cántico giving way in Clamor to the disorder that the title suggests. Yet, although Guillén at times permits chaos and disorder to surface thematically in his poetry, he never flags in creating in his work an ordered poetic whole, nor does he abandon the posture he adopted in 1921 regarding the importance of poetic order: “… la medida y el número … no entorpecen...