SOURCE: Morris, C. Brian. “The Oblique Language of Luis Cernuda: Creative Ruin or Fragments Shored?” In The Spanish Avant-Garde, edited by Derek Harris, pp. 190-203. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Morris explores Cernuda's use of surrealist language to subvert homosexual subtext.

The fragments to which Eliot refers in the last passage of The Waste Land are a cluster of phrases and quotations that, although they may have been thrown up by his memory, according to his earlier ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, as ‘a crowd of twisted things’, are assembled as a defence against disintegration, which is more likely to be textual and literary than emotional. If we further interpret Eliot's avowal as a positive measure against a negative threat, then The Waste Land can be seen as a sustained and distinguished product of a process that Paul Klee defined in an apparently startling...