SOURCE: “Guillén's Early Poetry and the Imagist Critique of Traditional Modes of Picturing,” in Romance Notes, Vol. 29, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 227-31.

In the following essay, Soufas discusses the use of imagery in Guillén's poetry.

The early poetry of Jorge Guillén acquires greater significance when understood in the context of an ongoing debate on the proper role of images in Western art (See Mitchell, Steiner, Lee). In his “Paragone,” Leonardo Da Vinci proclaims the superiority of images over words: “There is the same relation between facts and words that there is between painting and poetry, because facts are subject to the eye and words are subject to the ear” (12). For Leonardo, images are facts whereas words are merely signs of facts (Mitchell 121). In Laokoon, Lessing offers the classic rebuttal by redefining the verbal and visual arts in terms of their “essential” characteristics. Poetry is a medium...