Vincent Alexander

Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo (Seville, April 26, 1898-Madrid, December 13, 1984) was a Spanish poet of the so-called generation of '27. on June 30, 1949, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy on January 22, 1950. He occupied the chair of the letter O.

He won the National Literature Award in 1935 for Destruction or Love, the Critics' Award in 1963 for In a vast domain, and in 1969, for Poems of Consummation, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977.

Biography

The son of a family belonging to the Spanish bourgeoisie, his father, Cirilo Aleixandre Ballester, was a railway engineer. Several of Aleixandre's brothers died in childhood. Thus, Elvira died at the age of three, Fernando died at the age of a year and a half, and Sofía, at birth. The poet was born in Seville in 1898 but would spend his childhood in Malaga, where he shared studies with Emilio Prados. He moved to Madrid where he studied Law and Commerce. In 1919 he graduated in Law and obtained the title of mercantile intendant. In 1917 he met Dámaso Alonso in Las Navas del Marqués, a place where he spent the summer, who introduced him to reading Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. He worked as a professor of Commercial Law from 1920 to 1922 at the Madrid School of Commerce, and in the summer of 1920 he met the American Margarita Alpers at the Student Residence, with whom he also had a love affair in the summer of 1921, undone. when she had to leave for California. Alpers was married and is the recipient of some of the poems in Album; she believed that her daughter Juanita belonged to Aleixandre. This daughter wrote to him in 1965 to tell him that his mother had died of cancer.

His health began to deteriorate in 1922. In 1925 he was diagnosed with tuberculous nephritis, which ended with the removal of a kidney, an operation performed in 1932. He published his first poems in the Revista de Occidente in 1926 and in 1928 he began to read Freud, becoming involved in poetic surrealism. He established contact with Cernuda, Altolaguirre, Alberti and García Lorca. Throughout his life he hid his homosexuality. His first relationship would be with a woman, after the one he had with Alpers, and which marked him deeply, was with cabaret artist María Valls, better known by her stage name "Carmen from Granada"; this relationship inspired Vicente Aleixandre to write two poems by Ambito, «Lover» and «Cabeza en el recuerdo», and another by Sombra del paraíso, «Cabellera negra»; he transmitted gonorrhea which considerably aggravated his nephritis. After this relationship, and from 1923, he became friends with the German Hispanist Eva Seifert, who introduced him to Hölderlin's poetry. In 1927 he planted a cedar in his house in Velintonia that would accompany him for the rest of his life. ^{[citation needed ]}

In the 1930s, the poet met the socialist lawyer Andrés Acero and the two began an intense love affair that would be interrupted by Andrés' exile in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. In the words of Molina Foix, "Aleixandre was very shy about his homosexual condition because of the damage he could do to his family, especially his sister, but he told me that when he died he would not it mattered that the truth be known; he considered that it was not disgraceful »he also had a love affair with the film decorator José Manuel García Briz, who was a young nobleman, son of the IV Countess of Baynoa and brother of the Marquises of Vista Alegre.

On June 19, 1932, doctor Pedro Cifuentes removed Vicente Aleixandre's right kidney. Dámaso Alonso and Federico García Lorca visited him during his convalescence. Around 1935, Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Pablo Neruda, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Manuel Altolaguirre, Miguel Hernández, José Antonio Muñoz Rojas and his lover Andrés Acero frequented his house. He left a profile of many of them written in 1958, in his book Encounters , where he reflected what he felt the first time he met them.

In the first days of the Civil War, the victim of a complaint, he spent twenty-four hours in a checa from which he was released by his friend Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul at the time. A bombing raid destroyed his home and much of his library. In 1937 his health worsened markedly: he lost ten kilos in a few months and spent the last two years of the war in bed with a rigorous treatment of calcium injections, vitamins, and ultraviolet light baths. He made a great friendship with the literary critic José Luis Cano. He maintained a long correspondence with the painter Gregorio Prieto. After the war, despite his leftist ideas, he remained in Spain, in his same house, rebuilt in October 1940. His father had died that same year, after being purged by the Popular Front and exhaustively investigated by the winning side. And Aleixandre, in his internal exile, became during the post-war years one of the teachers of the young poets, with whom he corresponded abundantly and whom he received without sparing time at his home in Madrid, Wellingtonia (or Velintonia), 3 (since 1978, renamed Calle Vicente Aleixandre in his honor). On the upper floor settled her friend, the lesbian poet Carmen Conde, who had separated from her husband Antonio Oliver Belmás and had a married couple, Amanda Junquera Butler, wife of the professor of modern Spanish history Cayetano Alcazar. To both women Aleixandre would dedicate the poem "Offering" from his book Ultimate Birth. The poet, who for these years did not stop repeating that "poetry is communication", did not even have a problem sending unpublished poems to school magazines that requested it. Between 1939 and 1943 he wrote Shadow of Paradise, one of his most important books, published in Madrid in 1944. Along with Hijos de la ira, by his friend Dámaso Alonso, he also wrote of that year, constitutes one of the capital books of the literary current that Alonso came to baptize as Uprooted Poetry, parallel to Tremendismo in prose, during the First post-war generation. In 1943, by the way, a rumor spread throughout Mexico that he had died, for which Emilio Prados dedicated his book Mínima muerte , from 1944, to him as deceased. A young poet, Carlos Bousoño, wrote a famous doctoral thesis on his work and became one of his lovers; Aleixandre would write the prologue to Bousoño's collection of poems, Spring of Death (1946).

On January 22, 1950, he read his admission speech to the Royal Spanish Academy, which deals with the topic Life of the poet: love and poetry. His friend Dámaso Alonso read the reply speech. During the 1950s he gave various conferences in various cities in Spain, England and Morocco. The magazines Papeles de Son Armadans (1958), Ágora and Ínsula (1959) dedicated tribute issues to him. In the 1960s, some Spanish-American magazines did the same.

In 1963, the year in which he received the Critics' Award, he led the signing of a letter to the Francoist minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne requesting an investigation into the assaults and torture of Asturian miners and their wives during the 1962 strike. The letter It was signed by 120 Spanish intellectuals. Minister Fraga Iribarne published in response an "open letter" to one of the signatories (the poet José Bergamín), denying the facts.

The post-war poets, attracted by his figure, frequented his house: Jaime Gil de Biedma, Francisco Brines, Carlos Bousoño, José Luis Cano, José Hierro, Francisco Nieva, the Cántico group (especially Ricardo Molina) and the called Novísimos, especially Luis Antonio de Villena and Vicente Molina Foix.

On October 6, 1977, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature “for a work of innovative poetic creation that illustrates the condition of man in the cosmos and in our current society, while representing the great renewal, in the interwar period, of the traditions of Spanish poetry».

Urgently hospitalized on December 10, 1984, at the Santa Elena Clinic, with intestinal bleeding, he died on the night of December 13. He was buried in the family tomb of the Almudena Cemetery in Madrid on Saturday, December 15, 1984.

After the death of his great friend Carlos Bousoño, the verses and letters of explicit love and homosexual content that Aleixandre dedicated to him began to be made public.

In 2021, the protection of the poet's home, nor the dissemination and enhancement of his archive (currently in private hands), remained unclear until the Community of Madrid declared the archive of Cultural Interest (BIC) Alexander (2022). The documentary collection may not be divided or exported and must be offered to the public for study. His library includes more than 4,000 copies and 6,400 manuscripts, including unpublished poets.

Poetic work

His poetic work presents several stages: pure, surreal, and old age. In addition, this character shows us the true face of the people in his various poems such as " you came and left sweetly ".

Pure poetry

His first book, Ámbito, composed between 1924 and 1927 and published in Malaga in 1928, is the work of an incipient poet who has not yet found his own voice. The assonanted short verse and the aesthetics of pure Juan Ramon and Guillen poetry predominate, as well as ultraist echoes and classical Spanish poetry from the Golden Age, especially Fray Luis de León y Góngora.

Surrealist poetry

In the following years, between 1928 and 1932, there was a radical change in his poetic conception. Inspired by the precursors of surrealism (particularly by Arthur Rimbaud and Lautréamont) and by Freud, he adopted the prose poem (Passion of the Earth, 1935), free verse, and totally surreal procedures such as the verse and the visionary image (Swords as lips, from 1932; Destruction or love, from 1935, Shadow of Paradise, from 1944). The aesthetics of these collections of poems is irrational, and the expression is close to automatic writing, although without accepting it as a dogma of faith. In line with surrealism, the poet does not assume any tradition, not even metrics, and frees himself, so that even his friend Luis Cernuda was able to say: & # 34; His verse does not look like anything & # 34; 3. 4;. And indeed, his style brings unprecedented stylistic innovations such as the inverse simile (Swords as lips) or the equivalent disjunctive nexus (Destruction or love), the sum hyperbole, the uncoded dream symbol, definitively enriching the stylistic possibilities of the Spanish poetic language, as Garcilaso, Góngora and Rubén Darío did in the past, each of them a great innovator of lyrical language. The poet celebrates love as an ungovernable natural force, which destroys all the limitations of the human being, and criticizes the conventions with which society tries to capture it. His aesthetic is materialistic and cosmic pessimistic, unlike Jorge Guillén's optimism; he assumes the mortality of the individual as a fusion in nature in a deeply human form.

Anthropocentric poetry

After the Spanish Civil War, his work changed, approaching the concerns of prevailing social poetry. From a position of solidarity, he approaches the life of the common man, his sufferings and illusions. His style becomes simpler and more accessible. Two are the fundamental books of this period: Historia del corazón, from 1954 and In a vast domain, from 1962.

Old age poetry

In his last books (Poems of Consummation, from 1968, and Dialogues of Knowledge, from 1974) the poet begins his cycle of senectute and his style once again takes a turn, returning to procedures that recall his initial surrealism. The frustrating experience of the passage of time ("or late, or soon, or never"), of old age (in his poem "As Moses is the old" and others) and of the proximity of death lead him to reconsider his irrationalism youthful, although already in an extremely refined, meditative and serene modality. He uses a complex stylistic conceptualism that opposes concepts such as look / see , know / know and uses tenses and negative metaphor to create distance: & # 34; He was born, and did not know / He answered, and has not spoken & # 34;. The second, as its own title indicates, contains dialogues between highly abstract symbolic characters. To these two canonical titles, that is, those published during the poet's lifetime, a third could be added, En gran noche, published posthumously in 1991, which includes poems not included in the two previous books and in the same metaphysical and reflective line.

Books of prose and poetry

• Scope, Malaga (6th Supplement of Litoral), 1928.
• Swords like lipsM., Espasa-Calpe, 1932.
• Destruction or love, M., Signo, 1935 (National Prize for Literature 1934).
• Passion of the earth, Mexico, Fábula, 1935 (2th edition increased: Madrid, Adonais, 1946).
• Shadow of ParadiseM., Adam, 1944.
• In the death of Miguel HernándezZaragoza, Cuaderno de las Horas Situadas, 1948.
• World alone. With a portrait and six drawings by Gregorio Prieto M., Clan, 1950.
• Paradise PoemsMalaga, El Arroyo de los Angeles, 1952.
• Ultimate birthM., Insula, 1953.
• History of the HeartM., Espasa-Calpe, 1954.
• Paradise CityMalaga, Dardo, 1960.
• Complete poetryM., Aguilar, 1960. (Edic. of the author himself and Arturo del Hoyo)
• In a vast domain, M., Revista de Occidente, 1962 (Premio de la Critica).
• Portraits with nameB, Col. The Bardo, 1965.
• Complete works, M., Aguilar, 1968 (2nd edition increased: 1977).
• Poems of consummation, B., Plaza and Janés, 1968 (Critical Award).
• Surrealistic poetry. Anthology, B., Barral, 1971.
• Sound of warValencia, Hontanar, 1971.
• Dialogues of Knowledge, B., Plaza and Janés, 1974.
• Three pseudonym poemsMalaga, Col. Juan de Yepes, 1984.
• New Various Poems, B., Plaza and Janés, 1987. (Edic. Alejandro Duque Amusco; compilation: the same and Irma Emiliozzi)
• Prostracted, B., Plaza and Janés, 1987. (Edic. Alejandro Duque Amusco)
• Big night. Last poemsB., Seix Barral, 1991. (Edic. de Carlos Bousoño y Alejandro Duque Amusco)
• Album. Verses of youth (with Dámaso Alonso and others), B., Tusquets, 1993 (Edic. de Alejandro Duque Amusco y María-Jesus Velo).
• Prosa: The meetings. Evocations and opinions. Other notes for a poetic, M., Austral, 1998 (Edic. Alejandro Duque Amusco)
• Complete poetry, M., Visor/Community of Madrid/Ayuntamiento de Málaga, 2001 (Edic. de Alejandro Duque Amusco).
• Complete processing, M., Visor/Community of Madrid/Ayuntamiento de Málaga, 2002 (Edic. de Alejandro Duque Amusco).
• Complete poetry, Lumen, 2017. (Edic. de Alejandro Sanz).
• Visit all the heavens, Fundación Banco Santander, 2020.

Articles and writings

• The meetings (Review of the West, June 1963).
• Correspondence to Generation of 27 (1928-1984).