SOURCE: “World Alone: A Cosmovision and Metaphor of Absent Love,” in Critical Views on Vicente Aleixandre's Poetry, edited by Vincente Cabrera and Harriet Boyer, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1979, pp. 53-70.

In the following essay, Cabrera examines the pessimism in World Alone, noting how it fits into the larger vision of Aleixandre's works.

The poetic work of Vicente Aleixandre from Passion of the Earth up to Shadow of Paradise,¹ which makes up his first and perhaps richest period,² is characterized as much by the unity of the elemental and cosmic conception of its theme as by the coherent and imaginative homogeneity of its diction. This substructure of vision and diction on which the poetry of this period rests is the result of an ongoing evolution in which each book becomes an outgrowth of the former one; that is, a lyrical step forward which, deriving from the earlier...