SOURCE: “Nature and Society in the Poetry of Vicente Aleixandre,” in Texas Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1978, pp. 206-14.

In the following essay, González-Gerth discusses the dichotomy of nature and man in Aleixandre's poetry.

Vicente Aleixandre has been writing poetry for over half a century. To date he has written over thirty books and pamphlets of verse, and his collected poems and prose writings comprise two very substantial volumes. He belongs to an outstanding generation of Spanish poets, called the generation of 1927 because that year marked the tercentenary of Luis de Góngora's death and many young poets of the time visited Seville, where the Baroque master is buried, and gathered at the local Athenaeum to hold a ceremony. It was as if Spanish poetry, while reacting to the latest European literary currents, were self-consciously reaching back in its own history and tradition to rediscover the metaphorical genius of...