c.u.mmings, lover and circus performer, also engineer and gardener of words, was profoundly Anglo-American, especially in his rebelliousness. In general, we think of the United States as the land of great things: buildings, prosperity, cataclysms, machines. There is an Anglo-American tendency toward superlatives that, though it expresses that people"s immense energy, is sometimes only a grandiloquent gesture. Not even their best writers escape from the temptation to be heavyweight champions: Whitman, Pound, Faulkner, Melville (and now their painters: Pollock). There are also exceptions. One of them was d.i.c.kinson. c.u.mmings was another. His violence, his eroticism, and even his sentimentality have a measure: the poem. The best things he wrote were small compositions that remind us, on the one hand, of Elizabethan lyrics and, on the other, of certain French poets: of Apollinaire and, even more, of Max Jacob. It is not an influence: it is a resemblance. The surprising thing in c.u.mmings is not the pa.s.sion but rather the l.u.s.trous form in which it is expressed. All of his artifices-almost always happy ones-were so many dikes and filters whose purpose was to channel and purify the verbal material. The result was a song of incomparable translucence. c.u.mmings walked . . . through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give singing each morning out of each night L.K.
Notes.
1. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
A Modern Hymn
[PARIS, 1961].
In 1909, while still an adolescent, Saint-John Perse wrote his first known poem: Images Crusoe [Pictures for Crusoe]; in 1959 he published Chronique [Chronicle], his most recent poem. A half century separates these two works. Separates or unites? Both. Little remains of the world of Perse"s youth. Entire societies have disappeared, others have arisen, and those that have withstood the gale have been altered to such a degree that no one could say they are the same.
Something more than time has pa.s.sed during these fifty years. Certainly it is not the first period in which cataclysms have occurred. Formerly, however, the creation and destruction of empires scarcely ruffled the daily lives of men united by work and by rite to the rhythmic cycle of nature. Real life was not historical. Even up to the past century the separation between private life and public event persisted; except in rare and isolated moments-the Revolution of 1848, the Commune-history touched Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme only marginally. Today history not only occupies all terrestrial s.p.a.ce-there are no longer virgin peoples or virgin lands-it also invades our thoughts, depopulates our secret dreams, pulls us from our homes, and hurls us into the public vacuum. Modern man has discovered that life in history is an errant life. Saint-John Perse knows it better than anyone. But what history separates, poetry unites.
If we reread Perse"s books, we will observe that the same verbal current flows without interruption from Eloges [Praises] to Chronique. His language reabsorbs facts, trans.m.u.tes them, and, one might say, redeems them. Everything that has happened during these fifty years, not excepting the poet"s personal adventure, resolves into one work. Discord, breach, exile, love and love affairs, astonishment, the destruction and birth of cities, the debilitation of language, and the intolerable fever of the western sky are the images and rhymes of one vast poem. The disperseness of our world is revealed finally as a living unity. Not the unity of a system, which excludes contradiction and is always only a partial vision, but the unity of the poetic image. It has been said that the historian is a prophet in reverse, a diviner of the past; one might add that the poet is a historian who imagines what is happening. And what is most surprising is that his images are more genuine than are so-called historical doc.u.ments. If one wishes to know what really occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, one should refer, rather than to the dubious testimony of newspapers, to a few poetic works. One of them, the work of Saint-John Perse.
Images Crusoe ends with a sentence that is, simultaneously, an evocation and a prophecy: "You awaited the moment of departure, the rising of the great wind that would at one stroke, like the onslaught of the typhoon, dislodge you, parting the clouds before your expectant eyes . . ." Thus the first strophe of Chronique echoes the last strophe of the book of his youth: "Great epoch, behold us: the cool of evening on the heights, the breath of open s.p.a.ces on every threshold, and our brows bared to greater vistas . . ." Perse attends the rendezvous he made with himself when he was twenty years old. Age is not resignation: the world is still open and the poet"s preferred image is still that of the open road. Age is not a chair beside the fire, but a night outdoors. Chronique is one strophe more of the poem, a reiteration of the initial theme and augury of another adventure. Another? The same adventure, always the same, always different. Every book by Perse is one strophe of a single poem, and each of these great strophes is an isolated poem. Unity and multiplicity.
What is the theme of this poem, what story do those strophes called Eloges, Anabase [Anabasis], Exil [Exile], Vents [Winds], Amers [Seamarks], and Chronique tell us? The work begins as a song: praise of the natural world and the first age of man. Sea, sky, and land seen through the grave and astonished eyes of a child. Praise and farewell to infancy, to its "generous fable," and to the richness of its fare. The first book, the first strophe, is the announcement of a voyage: "All the world"s roads eat from my hand." It was a single step from Eloges to Anabase. Perse took that step without nostalgia, decided from that time forward to be the alien: there is no road back, no return to the native land. Anabase is an account of the peregrinations and movements-in s.p.a.ce, in time, and in the closed-off precinct of sleep-of races and civilizations, a celebration of the founding of laws and cities, an evocation of great traveler birds: "Fertile land of dream! Who speaks of building?" After Anabase the destiny of the alien is mixed with that of the rains, the snows, and the winds, images of change and migration, powerful condensations of the word "exile." The story of our times, yes, but at the same time the account of an exile that is endless because all human history is a history of exile. The planet itself is an errant body.
Perse"s adventure is precisely the opposite of circ.u.mnavigation. Every stop is a point of departure, a brief rest before continuing the journey. The geometric figure that governs this universe is the spiral, not the circle. Perse"s poetry must be read as an exercise in spiritual intrepidity. His poems do not offer us shelter against the night or against the storm: they are an encampment in the open. Nothing of roots: wings. His theme is multiple and simple: all times, and time. History without characters because the only real character in history is a nameless, faceless being, half-flesh and half-dream: the man each of us is and is not. A voyage without navigational charts or compa.s.s, because the cities, the ports, the islands-all that dazzling geography-fade away the moment we touch them. Chronicle of tempests and fair breezes, annals of the wind, book of seas and rivers, stone of heaven on which one can read, as if on a stele, the signs of good and bad years. Perse"s poetry unfolds beyond the bounds of optimism and pessimism, indifferent to the clash of names and the sordid litigations of morality and meanings. His morality is something different, something different his enthusiasm and his terrible energy. Perse"s theme is time, our substance. Poetry of time, that buries us and banishes us. If we are anything, we are a metaphor of time. An errant image.
Annals, chronicle, voyage: epic. Except that we are confronting a singular epic poem. Its form, the only one, perhaps, that an epoch like ours could tolerate, is far from traditional. (I will add, in pa.s.sing, that our century has proposed for itself the recovery of the epic genre. Even the novel, almost entirely dominated by the spirit of a.n.a.lysis, today is abandoning psychology, and its most daring expressions are once again moving toward poetry, with its unitarian vision and its recreation of language.) Once the difficulties that every poem offers to unattentive eyes have been overcome, the first thing that surprises the reader of Anabase or Vents is the absence of a narrative. The poet speaks of emigrations, conquests, voyages, rites, the invention of techniques, discoveries of new lands, elections of dignitaries, councils, usurpations, celebrations, and still one cannot introduce a lineal narrative into all this disconcerting fluctuation of centuries and events. We are at the center of the whirlwind. History is movement, but we are ignorant of the direction of that movement. Perhaps the historians know? In lieu of the always provisional explanations of philosophers of history, the poet gives us the feeling and meaning of historical life. Meaning is not the direction of events (something, furthermore, that no one knows): the meaning of history is not beyond, in the past or in the future, but in the here and now. On this earth and in this instant man is constructing cities, founding monarchies, celebrating a.s.semblies, drawing up codes of law; he is writing poems or preparing his destruction. In a word, he is struggling against death, making of each of his hours a work or an act: monument and ruin. Although Perse"s poetry does not adopt the lineal form of narration, its subject matter is epic. With an abundance of examples that is testimony to a very rich and vital experience, he unfolds before our eyes the variety, at once admirable and laughable, of man"s works, occupations, and acts. Without referring to philosophies, he brings us face to face with the immediate meaning of history: create or perish.
If the narrative disappears, dissolved in the whirlwind of movement, what happens to heroes? They all display masks. None has a name: the alien, the regent, the usurper, tragic women, the clerk, viceroys, the financier, the astrologer . . . Functions, honors, positions-some as ancient as civilization, others imaginary. Men of all cla.s.ses and all cla.s.ses of men. As in the work of Joyce, all the characters blend into one. And that one never speaks in his own voice. As soon as he breaks the silence he manifests himself as a multiplicity of voices and changing presences. Dialogue or monologue? At times, a choral poem; at other times, the recitation, meditation, or supplication of a single voice. Woman is women and women are the sea. The alien is the poet and the poet is language. Wind, clouds, rocks, sea-omnipotent and omnipresent in Perse"s spirit-great trees, metals, the three kingdoms (and the others) are also characters. The poet is the chronicler of the rains, the historian of the snows. The annals of history blend into physical phenomena. The storm, lightning, summer are part of the gest. Or is it the reverse? Does Perse conceive of history as a natural event? Perhaps it is neither. The vision is total. History and nature are dimensions of being, extremes of the same adventure. And man? Man, too, is adventure, a wager that life has made with itself. In Chronique we find this strange sentence that sheds some light upon what we may perhaps call the "transhumanism" of Perse: "Engendered of no one, can we really know toward what species we advance?" The center of the poem is man, but man seen as a transitory being, one moving toward another state: "We are shepherds of the future . . ."
Cla.s.sifications are dangerous. Perse"s poetry does not so much resemble the traditional epic poems as the sacred books of the Orient or the Mayan cosmogonies. Along with these religious texts one would have to mention books of history, not those of historians, but those of doers: Bernal Daz, Babur. On the other hand, Perse"s work gathers together and amplifies the modern tradition, especially that following Claudel and Segalen. This tradition is born of Mallarme and his concept of the page as animated s.p.a.ce. In the works of these three poets, that s.p.a.ce is blended with a vision of the great plains of central Asia. In our poet we find, in addition, another, no less powerful, terrestrial element. Frequently one forgets that, if there is a Tartar Saint-John Perse, there is also a Saint-John Perse of the American tropics and sea: the world of Eloges is the world of the Antilles. In this work the great plains of the Asiatic nomads and the sparkling islands of the Caribbean come together. The importance of geography, real or imaginary, to the inspiration of this French poet reveals to us once again that his picture of history is not that of our scholarly manuals or that of our philosophers; Perse"s idea of the future is that of s.p.a.ce to be encompa.s.sed or conquered: it is not a point at which one must arrive but a place that must be peopled. s.p.a.ce is erotic: "Young women! and a country"s nature is scented with them . . ." Amers contains one of the great love poems of modern French poetry. And the Recitation L"eloge d"une reine [Recitation in praise of a queen] and . . . but why recall other poems? Enumerations are boring. History, geography, images of the voyage and of eroticism, Perse"s poetry culminates in a song to the act of singing. Word that does not exalt any specific action, rather, the original act, the pure act, word of creative energy. Why should it be surprising that it be converted into praise of man"s loftiest act: the poem? A celebration of language, Perse"s poetry is a return to the origins of the poem: the hymn. An exclamation to life, an approbation of existence, praise. Poetry that ignores the G.o.ds but bathes in their fountain: "Truly I dwell in the throat of a G.o.d." Our terrible epoch is not solely doubt and negation. A poet accepts it in its totality. No true poet is Manichaean. Good and evil, the dark and the luminous sides, are not separate ent.i.ties, they are the two sides of a Being that is eternally the same-although it is never the same. The poet ignores dispute: his song is praise.
M.S.P.
Antonio Machado
[PARIS, 1951].
Prose and poetry, life and work, blend together naturally in the J figure of Antonio Machado. His song is also thought; his thought, a reflection of the song about itself. Through poetry, Machado moves outside himself, seizes time and the forms within which time unfolds: a landscape, the beloved, a lemon tree standing before a white wall. Through thought he recovers himself, conceives himself. Poetry and reflection are vital operations. But it is not his life that sustains his work. Rather, the reverse is true: the life of Machado the gloomy Segovian professor, the absent-minded recluse, is supported by the work of Machado the poet and philosopher. In the same way that his first poems may be understood completely only in the light of his last meditations, his life is intelligible only through his work. It is his work"s creation. And his death"s. His life acquired its full significance through his death; or, to be more precise, when he died-two days after having crossed the French frontier with the remnants of the Popular Army-his life was finally realized, consummated. Previously his life had been all dream and reflection: dreaming, or dreaming that he dreamed, aspiring to realize himself through something beyond himself, but something through whose contact he could become himself. Machado always said that he had not been present at the most important event of his life, although he had recalled it many times in dreams. That was the afternoon his parents first met and fell in love. I am sure that when he died he did something more than recall that encounter: the lovers on that afternoon of sun and sea and sailboats along the banks of the Guadalquivir truly began to exist.
One must not confuse naturalness with simplicity. No one is more natural than Machado, and nothing is more elusive than that natural-ness. His poetry is as clear as water. As clear as running water and, like water, as impossible to grasp. The masks-Abel Martn, Juan de Mairena-with which the poet covered his face, so that the philosopher Machado may speak with greater freedom, are transparent. Machado disappears behind that transparency. He slips away because of "fidelity to his own mask." Abel Martn, the Sevillian metaphysician, and Juan de Mairena, the professor of gymnastics and rhetoric, the inventor of a poetry machine, are and are not Machado the poet, the philosopher, the French professor, the Jacobin, the lover, the recluse. The mask, identical to his face, is elusive. Each time it is surrendered, it smiles: something has still not been expressed. To understand the erotic metaphysics of Abel Martn, we must attend to the comments of Juan de Mairena. These lead us to Machado"s poems. Every personage carries us to another. Every fragment echoes, alludes to, and emblematizes a secret totality. That is why it is not possible to study only a portion of his work. It must be embraced as a whole. Or, more accurately, one must embrace each of its parts as a totality, since each is a reflection of that hidden unity.
Although Machado"s work is indivisible, it does have different strata. Each stratum is seen through the transparency of another. Machado"s clarity is dizzying. To read him is to sink, to penetrate into an unending transparency: into a consciousness that reflects itself. Machado"s masks seem to tell us that they are something more than masks: they are the changing forms in which a perpetually mobile face has become fixed. Elusiveness is a provocation, and its only object is that of exciting our thirst. Machado, that self-absorbed man, knows that he can reveal himself only in "otherness," in an opposite that is a complement: the poet in the philosopher, the lover in absence, the recluse in the crowd, the prisoner of the "I" in the "thou" of the beloved or in the "we" of people.
Abel Martn interrogates his creator: he wants to know who was this poet Antonio Machado and what did his poems mean. Perhaps, he insinuates, nothing radically different from what his prose expresses or what, with greater clarity and conciseness, his life and his death affirm: the I, the consciousness of self, is a way of life peculiar to modern man. It is his fundamental condition: to it he owes all that he is. But it is a condition that asphyxiates him and ends by mutilating him. In order to be, in order for the I to be realized and achieve its fullness, change is necessary: the I aspires to thouness, oneness to otherness; "to be is to covet being what one is not." But reason persists in remaining identical to itself and reduces the world to its own image. By affirming itself it denies objectivity. Abel Martn rejects as illusion all forms in which comprehension apprehends objectivity, because in each of them the object is reduced to the tyranny of subjectivity. Only in love is it possible to capture what is radically "other" without reducing it to consciousness. The erotic object-"that opposes the loved one like a magnet, attracting and repelling"-is not a representation but a true presence: "Woman is the obverse of being." As he apprehends the irreducible erotic object-the phrase is not contradictory because only to reason is the object ungraspable-the lover touches the frontiers of true objectivity, he transcends himself, he becomes other. Machado is the poet of love, his mask, the philosopher Abel Martn, tells us.
In Machado"s poems love appears almost always as nostalgia or remembrance. The poet is still imprisoned in subjectivity: "The beloved does not appear at the rendezvous, the beloved is absence." Machado"s metaphysical eroticism has in it nothing of Platonism. His women are not archetypes but creatures of flesh and blood; however, their reality is phantasmal; they are empty presences. And his lover is Onan or Don Juan, the two poles of solitary love. Beloved and lover coincide only in absence, both trapped in a temporality that hurls them beyond themselves and at the same time isolates them. Absence is the purest form of temporality. Erotic dialogue is transformed into monologue, that of lost love, of dreamed love. The poet is alone with time, confronting time. Machado"s poetry is not a song of love, it is a song of time. Machado is the poet of time, the critic Juan de Mairena tells us.
As poet of time, Machado aspires to the creation of a temporal language that will be living word within time. He disdains baroque art because it kills time by attempting to enclose it in conceptual prisons. He wants to possess it alive, as did Becquer and Velzquez, those "jailers of time." The poetry of time will be that poetry farthest removed from conceptual language; it will be concrete, fluid, common, ordinary language: popular speech. His love for the language of the people blends with his love for traditional poetry: Jorge Manrique and the old Spanish ballads. Machado"s traditionalism is the opposite of what one would call a cult of the past; rather, it is a cult of the present, of that which is always present. He is a traditional poet because the people are the only living tradition of Spain. The rest-church, aristocracy, military: the past-is an empty structure that, through its very pretension to atemporality, oppresses and mutilates the living present, popular and traditional Spain.
Granted, the language of time perhaps is not the spoken language of Castile"s ancient cities. At least, it is not the language of our time. Those are not our words. The idiom of the large modern city, as Apollinaire and Eliot understood it, is something different. Machado reacted to the rhetoric of Ruben Daro by returning to tradition; but other adventures, and not a return to the old ballads, awaited Spanish-language poetry. Years later Huidobro, Vallejo, Neruda, and other Spanish American poets sought and found the new language: the language of our time. It was not possible to follow Machado and Unamuno in their return to traditional forms, and that is the reason for their negligible influence on the new poets. Something similar may be said about the Hispanicism of some of Machado"s poems (in the slightly oppressive and unbreathable meaning that the word has for us Spanish Americans). It is here that elusiveness appears more clearly and becomes ambivalence. Because Machado-unlike Juan Ramn Jimenez-was the first to foresee the death of Symbolist poetry; furthermore, he was the only one among his contemporaries and immediate successors who was aware of the situation of the poet in the modern world. At the same time, he closed his eyes to the adventure of modern art. This adventure, as we all know, consists above all in discovering the poetry of the city, in trans.m.u.ting the language of the urban area, not in regressing to the idiom of traditional poetry. Machado understood our situation but his poetry does not express that understanding. In this sense his prose is more fecund than his poetry.
Time escapes him. In order to recapture it, in order to revive it, he will have to think it. The poet of time is also its philosopher. Reflection about time leads him to thoughts about death. Man is projected into time: all life is projection into a time whose only perspective is death. Machado confronts death, but he does not perceive it, in the manner of the Stoics, as something radically different from life or, in the manner of the Christians, as transit or the leap from this world to the other. Death is a part of life. Life and death are two halves of the same sphere. Man realizes himself in death. Only, contrary to what Rilke believed, death, for the Spanish poet, is not the realization of the I; the I is unrealizable. Imprisoned in subjectivity, imprisoned in time, man realizes himself when he transcends himself: when he becomes other. We find our realization in death when, far from dying our own deaths, we die with others, in the place of others, and for the sake of others. In one of the last texts we have by Machado, written shortly before the fall of Barcelona, the poet tells us that the hero, the common soldier, the Spanish militiaman, "is the only one who realizes that freedom for death of which Heidegger speaks." And he adds: "The sudden disappearance of the young gentleman [seorito] and the no less sudden appearance of gentlemanliness [seorio] in the faces of the militiamen are two concomitant phenomena. Because death is a matter for men, and only a man-never a seorito-can look at death face to face." In order to die for others you must live for others, affirm unto death the life of others. Machado, at the end of his life, denies the enemies of the Spanish people any possibility of transcending themselves, of giving life to others with their deaths. These men are condemned to dying badly, to dying alone. Their death is sterile.
Meditation on death is thus converted into a new reflection on what Machado himself called "the essential heterogeneity of being." Being is pure eroticism, thirst for otherness; man realizes himself in woman, the I in the community. The most personal poetry will be that which expresses the most universal and common vision. Machado realizes that there is a contradiction between his song and his thought. And thus he justifies his personal lyric: the modern poet sings to himself because he does not encounter themes of communion. We are living the end of a world and of a style of thinking: the end of bourgeois lyricism, the end of the Cartesian I. At the frontiers of love and death, enclosed in his solitude, the poet sings the song of time: he counts the hours remaining until all masks fall and man, freed at last from himself, can be reconciled with man. Only the people-"the late-born son of the exhausted bourgeoisie"-through the revolutionary transformation of the human condition, will be able to break the sh.e.l.l of subjectivity, the rock crystal prison of the Cartesian I. The erotic metaphysics of Abel Martn, the anguish of time suffered by Juan de Mairena, the solitude of Antonio Machado, all flow into history.
Machado possessed intuitive insight into the essential themes of the poetry and philosophy of our time. His vision of being as heterogeneity and otherness seems to me to touch the very heart, the central theme, of contemporary philosophy; his lack of confidence in the Hegelian dialectic-source of so many of the evils of our era-and his insistence on examining the principle of ident.i.ty through new eyes also show, and with great profundity, that the critique that philosophy makes of itself and of its fundamentals coincides with the loftiest aspirations of poetry. Novalis thought that "superior logic would abolish the principle of contradiction." Machado"s work offers a way to attain that future logic. Furthermore, no one among us has lived with greater lucidity the conflict of the modern poet exiled from society and, finally, exiled from himself, lost in the labyrinth of his own consciousness. The poet does not find himself because he has lost everyone else. We have all lost our common voice, the human and concrete objectivity of our fellow beings. Our poet valorously lived this contradiction. He always refused the transcendency offered by belief in a G.o.d-Creator. For Machado, the divinity is man"s creature (G.o.d is the author of the "great Zero" and his only creation is Nothingness). Blasphemous and reticent, pa.s.sionate and skeptical, Machado rejects everything-except man. But his point of departure-and herein reside his great originality and the fecundity of his work-is not consciousness of the self but of its absence, nostalgia for the thou. This thou is not the generic objectivity of a faithful member of a party or of a church. The poet"s thou is an individual, irreducible being. Concrete metaphysics, a metaphysics of love and-let us say the word-of charity.
Through the process of a dialectic of love, Machado"s man finds himself only when he surrenders himself. There is a moment when the thou of love is converted into the we. In 1936, by the light of burning churches, the poet could contemplate for the first time the appearance of that we in which all contradictions are resolved. Beneath the purifying flames, the face of the Spanish people was the same as that of love or death. Liberty had become incarnate. Abel Martn, Juan de Mairena, and Antonio Machado were not alone. They had ceased to be masks: they were beginning to be. They could die: they had lived.
M.S.P.
Jorge Guillen
[DELHI, 1965].
Jorge Guillen occupies a central place in modern Spanish poetry. It is central in a paradoxical way: his work is an island, yet at the same time it is the bridge uniting the survivors of Modernism and the Generation of "98 to the Generation of 1925. His three great predecessors, who conceived of the poem as meditation (Unamuno), exclamation (Jimenez), or word in time (Machado), surely looked upon the appearance of his first works as heresy. Machado, at least, spoke out. In an article in 1929, after welcoming "the recent admirable books of Jorge Guillen and Pedro Salinas," he added: These poets-perhaps Guillen more than Salinas-tend to leap like bullfighters into that central zone of our psyche where the lyric has always been born. . . . They are richer in concepts than in intuitions. . . . They give us, in each image, the last link of a chain of concepts. . . . This artificially hermetic lyric4s a baroque form of the old bourgeois art.
Some years later, in 1931, he reiterated: I feel I am out of tune with today"s poets. They propose the de-temporalization of the lyric . . . especially by employing images more in a conceptual than an emotive function. . . . The intellect has never sung, that is not its mission.
In other articles I have concerned myself with Machado"s ideas on poetry, so here I will repeat only that his criticism of modern poets is part of his repudiation of the baroque aesthetic. Aside from the fact that his condemnation of the baroque is unjust, it is a confusion to identify it with modern art. Both the baroque and the modern poet believe that the metaphor-the image or conceit-is the center of the poem; its function is to create surprise, the "marvel that suspends the soul," through the discovery of unsuspected relationships among objects. However, the modern image is an acceleration of the relationships among things and it tends always to be dynamic and temporal, whereas the baroque conceit and metaphor are congealed movement. The poetry of our seventeenth century aspires to enthrall: its goal is beauty. Modern poetry is an explosion or an exploration: destruction or discovery of reality. The first is an aesthetic; the second, a religion, an act of faith or of desperation. The baroque poem is a verbal monument: a cla.s.sicism that contemplates itself and, in so doing, recreates itself. The modern poem is an emblem, a conjugation of signs: a romanticism that reflects upon itself and destroys itself. In sum, the baroque poem is the reflection of a Renaissance construction, distorted by the changing waters of the river or the mirror; the modern poem perches at the edge of the abyss: its foundation is criticism and its subject matter the discontinuous current of the consciousness.
When I compare them to the tendencies of the avant-garde, Guillen"s poems also seem to be something akin to a silent scandal. Silent because of their reserve; scandal because of their apparent negation of time. (Again, time.) Like Unamuno, Machado, and Jimenez, the vanguardists emphasized the identification between word and "elapsing," only in a more radical and more lucid way. To submit oneself to the "inexhaustible murmuring" of the Surrealist inspiration; to give oneself to the suicidal act of Dadaistic absurdity (today repeated ad nauseam by talentless disciples who have converted its practice into a secure routine); to believe, as Huidobro believed, that the image is solely flight, thus confusing creation and release-these were and are simply various ways to dissolve the word in time. And what of the ultrastas? Argentine and Spanish ultrasmo had no aesthetic-it had a great poet, Jorge Luis Borges, also obsessed by time, although not time as elapsing but as repet.i.tion, or cessation of movement: eternal return, or eternity. Thus, what separates Jorge Guillen from his predecessors is what unites him with his contemporaries: the image; and he is differentiated from them by his concept of the poem. For the Surrealists and Dadaists, what is important is the poetic experience, not the poem. For creacionismo, poetry is reduced to the verbal object: the poem. In the prologue to the North American selection, Cntico [Song], Guillen defines in a sentence the purpose that animated him: "It was essential to identify-to the ultimate-poem and poetry." He believed that time in a poem is neither nature"s time (if nature has time) nor human time. Because it is a sign, the word is a notation of elapsing, a notation that itself elapses and changes. These notations, words that are rhythms and rhythms that are words, in their distinct a.s.sociations and oppositions engender another time: a poem, in which, while always hearing the flow of human hours, we hear other hours. The hours Fray Luis de Len heard in the silence of the serene night. One could say that Guillen"s poems are like music: "A mechanism to kill time." I prefer, notwithstanding, a longer and more accurate formula: a mechanism that kills time in order to revive it in other time. A mechanism of symbols, itself a symbol of the world that is created every day before our eyes.
Guillen"s att.i.tude toward language was less theoretical and more direct than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. He did not ask himself what language is but what words are and how one should group them to elicit that strange ent.i.ty one calls a poem. A selection and composition of phrases and terms, the poem is a conjugation of signs fixed on the page; at the moment they are read they acquire life, they shine or they are extinguished: they signify. The poem: a mechanism of significances and rhythms that the reader sets in motion. It is astonishing that in Spain and Latin America he has been criticized as an intellectual poet. In truth, the only intellectual poets of this epoch were two Spanish Americans: the Mexican Jose Gorostiza and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Because they are intellectuals they are poets of time-they are not in time, as Machado wished. (We are all in time, we all are time, but only a few ask themselves what happens when time pa.s.ses: they are true poets of time. Borges and Gorostiza belong to the great tradition of intellectual poetry: Coleridge, Leopardi, Valery . . .) Although we can extract a doctrine from Guillen"s work-Jaime Gil de Biedma has done it ably-the Castilian poet did not propose to meditate but to sing. Meditation is not in his song: it sustains it. He is the least intellectual poet of his generation, by which I do not mean that he is the least intelligent. Perhaps just the opposite: he exercises his intelligence in his poems, not outside them. Like all intelligence, his is critical; like all creative criticism, it is invisible: it is not in what he says but in how he says it and above all in what he does not say. Silence is a part of language and an authentic poet is distinguished more by the temper of his silences than by the sonority of his words. Guillen"s intelligence is not speculative; it is knowledge in action, a sentient wisdom; a feeling for weight and heat, the color and meaning of words, not excluding the almost incorporeal monosyllable.
Artisan"s intelligence at the service of the act: a form of instinct. Except that this is a lucid instinct capable of reflecting upon itself. For that reason it is also consciousness. It is not strange that Guillen has been compared to Valery. Although his first poems reveal a reading of the French poet, the resemblance is superficial: by this I mean that it is a similarity of appearances or surfaces, not of coloration, intonation, or meaning. In both poets the word tends to be transparent, but the physical and spiritual realities we see through that transparency are very different. Valery"s clarity is an act of a consciousness that contemplates itself to the point of obliterating itself. The words do not reflect the world; those b.r.e.a.s.t.s and serpents, those isles and columns that appear in Valery"s poems are a landscape of sensitive signs, fictions the consciousness invents in order to prove to itself that it exists. The theme of "La jeune parque" [The young Fate] is consciousness of self; and, if the theme of Le cimetiere marin [The graveyard by the sea] is not the nonexistence of self, it is about its unreality: the I is condemned to thinking about itself without ever touching the flaming surface of the sea. "The more I think about you, Life, the less you surrender yourself to thought." Consciousness lives from what it kills, "secretly armed with its nothingness." Valery"s dialogue is with himself; Cntico is "the dialogue between man and creation." Guillen"s transparency reflects the world, and his word is perpetual will for embodiment. Seldom has the Castilian language achieved such corporeal and spiritual plenitude. Totality of the word. Guillen has been called the poet of being. That is precise, on the condition that being is conceived of, not as idea or essence, but as presence. In Cntico being actually appears. It is the world, the reality of this world. Multiple and unique presence, a thou sand adorable or terrible appearances resolved into one powerful affirmation of pleasure. Joy is power, not dominion. It is the great Yes with which being celebrates itself and sings of itself.
Guillen"s word is not suspended above the abyss. It knows the intoxication of enthusiasm, not the vertigo of the void. The earth that sustains his word is this earth we tread every day, "prodigious, not magical"; a marvel that physics explains in a formula and the poet welcomes with an exclamation. To have his feet firmly on the ground is a reality that enraptures the poet; I will say, moreover, that flight also exhilarates him, for the same reason: the leap is no less real than gravity. He is not a realistic poet; his theme is reality. A reality that custom, lack of imagination, or fear (nothing frightens us so much as reality) prevents us from seeing; when we do see it, its abundance alternately fascinates and annihilates us. Abundance, Guillen underlines, not beauty. Abundance of being: things are what they are and for that reason they are exemplary. On the other hand, man is not what he is. Guillen knows that, and thus Cntico is not a hymn to man: it is the praise man makes to the world, praise from the being who knows he is nothing to the being filled with being. The cloud, the girl, the poplar, the automobile, the horse-all are presences that enchant him. They are the gifts of being, the gifts life gives us. Poet of presence, Guillen sings of the present: "The past and the future are ideas. Only the present is real." The now in which all presences unfold is a point of convergence; the unity of being is dispersed in time; its dispersion is concentrated in the instant. The present is the point of view of unity, the instantaneous clarity that reveals it. Cntico is a sentient ontology . . . But I am reducing many intuitions, moments of awe, exclamations to ideas and concepts, and I am thus disfiguring certain quotidian and singular experiences. Uplifted by the great vital wave, the poet exclaims: "To sing, to sing without design." Without design, not without measure. Joy bursts forth from rhythmic abundance; joy, in turn, is rhythmic. Onomatopoeia and refrain adjust to measure and acquire significance: "Mrmara, mar, maramar . . ."1 To sing without design, not without beat or meaning.
Exaltation of the world and of the instant has caused various critics to point out a certain affinity between the Spanish poet and Whitman. Guillen himself has emphasized more than once his kinship to the author of Leaves of Gra.s.s. The resemblance is deceptive. Whitman sees being more as movement than as presence. The contemplation of movement, which in other spirits produces vertigo (nothing remains; creation and destruction, yesterday and tomorrow, good and evil are synonymous), is converted in the work of the North American poet into celebration of the future. His reality is the future: not what we see but what is to come. Behind Guillen lies the old Hispanic-Catholic notion of substance; behind Whitman, the vision of becoming. And more: the idea of the world as action; reality is what I make it. For that reason Whitman is a poet naturally at home in history-especially if one believes, as he believed, that history means people in movement. Whitman"s true landscape is not nature but history: what men make of time, not what time makes of us. Following Cntico Guillen wrote another book: Clamor.2 Its theme is the "negative elements: evil, disorder, death." Satire, elegy, morality: the poet facing contemporary history. The differences leap into view. For Guillen history is evil; for Whitman it is the irresistible movement of cosmic life that is, in this time and in this place, embodied in the exploits of a people destined for universality. The Castilian poet is facing toward what happens and for that reason he writes satires and elegies, forms that imply distance and judgment; the North American becomes a part of the ascendant movement of history-he is history itself and his song is a celebration, not a judgment, of what is happening.
Clamor shows another aspect of Guillen the man and thus reveals to us the exact.i.tude of Camusis phrase "solitary: solidarity." But I fear that this book does not reveal another aspect of his poetry. Guillen is not Whitman. Neither is he Mayakovsky. This is not surprising: to Spaniards and Latin Americans history is not what we have done or what we do, rather it is what we have allowed others to do to us. For more than three centuries our way of living history has been to suffer it. Like the majority of the Spaniards of his generation, Guillen suffered it: war, oppression, exile. Nevertheless, history is not his pa.s.sion, although it is his right and honest preoccupation. If there is a poet in the Spanish language for whom history has been both choice and destiny, shared and apportioned pa.s.sion, that poet is Cesar Vallejo. The Peruvian does not judge. Like Whitman, he partic.i.p.ates, although in the inverse sense. He is not the actor, he is the victim. In this way, he is also history. Guillen"s theme is more vast and more universal than Vallejo"s, but it is also more external: he denounces evil, he does not expiate it. Evil is not only what is done to us but also what we ourselves do. To recognize that is to encounter one of the few routes of access to true history; that was the great achievement of The Fall, an exemplary book. (It is good to say it now that it has become fashionable to underrate Camus"s works.) I want to be understood: when I say that Guillen does not interiorize evil, that he does not make it his own, and therefore that he does not conjure it or exorcise it, I am not reproaching his moral att.i.tude or accusing him of Manichaeism. The lowering of tension in many pa.s.sages of Clamor simply confirms that a poet"s universality-and Guillen is a universal poet-does not depend upon the extent of his moral, philosophical, or aesthetic preoccupations but upon the concentration of his poetic vision. Some are called to write Cntico or Anabase [Anabasis], others The Pisan Cantos or Poemas humanos [Human poems].
Guillen"s influence on the poetry of our language has been profound and fertile. Profound, because it has been the opposite of a style-the choice of a few isolated poets; fertile, because it was a critical example and thus taught us that all expression implies silence and all creation, criticism. He was a master from the first, as much for his contemporaries as for those of us who came later. Federico Garca Lorca was the first to recognize it; I am sure I shall not be the last. His elders also realized the significance of his poetry, and Machado"s criticism is streaked with conscious admiration. I refer to Machado because in my judgment he is the antipode of Guillen-something, actually, that Machado knew better than anyone. Two poets I admire attacked him ferociously. We often see smallness in the great among us: must one recall Quevedo, Gngora, Lope de Vega, Mira de Amescua? (I mention the dead because I prefer not to remind myself of some no less ill.u.s.trious among the living.) But Guillen is a great poet because of the perfection of his creations, not because of the influence he exercised. His poems are true poems: verbal objects closed upon themselves, animated by a cordial and spiritual force. That force is called enthusiasm. Its other name: inspiration. And something more: fidelity, faith in the world and in the word. The world of the word as much as the word of the world: Cntico. Confronting the spectacle of the universe-not the spectacle of history-Guillen once said: The world is well made . . . Confronting his work, one need only repeat those words.
M.S.P.
Notes.
NOTE: Apropos of the publication of Cntico: A Selection, ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown & Co., 1965).
1. This play on the basic word mar ("sea"), in addition to its pleasant rhythm, suggests various other words, among them mrmura ("murmur"), miramar ("sea view"), and several combinations of mar and amar ("to love").-Trans.
2. Clamor consists of three volumes: Maremgnum [Confusion], Que van a dar en la mar [Rivers that flow to the sea], and A la altura de las circunstancias [Abreast of circ.u.mstances].
III.
Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion and A Literature of Foundations.
Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion.
[MEXICO CITY, 1942].
Reality-everything we are, everything that envelops us, that sustains and, simultaneously, devours and nourishes us-is richer and more changeable, more alive, than all the ideas and systems that attempt to encompa.s.s it. In the process of reducing nature"s rich, almost offensive spontaneity to the rigidity of our ideas, we mutilate its most fascinating element: its naturalness. Man, as he con-fronts reality, subjugates it, mutilates it, and submits it to an order that belongs, not to nature (if by chance nature possesses anything equivalent to what we call order), but to thought. Thus we do not truly know reality, but only the part of it we are able to reduce to language and concepts. What we call knowledge is knowing enough about a thing to be able to dominate it and subdue it.
I do not mean, of course, that technique is knowledge. But, even when it is not possible to extract a technique (that is, a procedure for transforming reality) from knowledge, all processes of learning are still the expression of an anxiety to have this untouchable reality in our power-on our own terms and for our own ends. It is no exaggeration to call this human att.i.tude a desire for domination. Like a warrior, man struggles to subdue nature and reality. His instinct for power is expressed not only in war, in politics, in technics but also in science and philosophy, in everything that has come to be called, hypocritically, disinterested knowledge.
This is not the only att.i.tude that man may a.s.sume when faced with the world"s reality and his own consciousness. His contemplation may have no practical consequence, and thus he may derive no knowledge, no opinion, no salvation or condemnation from it. This impractical, superfluous, and unserviceable contemplation is not directed toward learning, toward the possession of what is contemplated; it intends only to immerse itself in its object. The man meditating in this fashion does not propose to learn anything; he wants only to forget himself, to prostrate himself before what he sees, to become a part, if possible, of what he loves. His astonishment in the presence of reality leads him to deify it; fascination and horror move him to become one with his object. Perhaps the root of this att.i.tude of adoration is love, which is an instinct to possess the object; a desiring, but also a fervent wish for fusion, for forgetfulness, and for dissolution of the self in "otherness." In love we find not only the instinct that impels us to survive or to reproduce ourselves: the instinct for death, the true instinct for perdition, the soul"s force of gravity, is also a part of its contradictory nature. Silent rapture, vertigo, the seduction of the abyss, the desire to fall, infinitely and without rest, each time deeper, are nourished in love; also nostalgia for our origin, man"s obscure movement toward his roots, toward his own birth. Because in love the couple attempts to partic.i.p.ate once again in that state in which death and life, necessity and satisfaction, dream and act, word and image, time and s.p.a.ce, fruit and lip blend together into a single reality. The lovers descend toward always more ancient and naked states: they recover the animal and even the plant that live in each of us; and they experience a presentiment of the pure energy that moves the universe and the inertia into which the vertigo of that energy is transformed.
The innumerable and varied postures man a.s.sumes when facing reality may be reduced-with all the dangers of such excessive simplification-to these two att.i.tudes. Both are found with a certain purity in the magic and religion of archaic societies (although, strictly speaking, magic and religion are inseparable, since there are religious elements in all magic activity, and vice versa). Whereas the priest prostrates himself before his G.o.d, the magician rises up against reality and, convoking the occult powers, bewitching nature, compels the rebellious forces to obedience. One supplicates and loves, the other coaxes and coerces. So, is the poetic process a magic or a religious activity? Neither. Poetry cannot be reduced to any other experience. But the spirit that expresses it, the means it employs, its origin and its end may well be magic or religious. In the case of the sacred, the att.i.tude crystallizes into plea, into prayer, and its most intense and profound manifestation is the mystic ecstasy: the surrender to the absolute, and union with G.o.d. Religion-in this sense-is dialogue, loving relationship with the Creator. The lyric poet also undertakes a dialogue with the world; there are two extremes in this dialogue: one, solitude; the other, communion. The poet always attempts to communicate, to unite {reunite would be more accurate) with his object: his own soul, the beloved, G.o.d, nature . . . Poetry leads the poet toward the unknown. And lyric poetry, which begins as an intimate bedazzlement, ends either in communion or in blasphemy. It does not matter whether the poet makes use of the magic of words, of the bewitchment of language, to woo his object: he never intends to utilize it like the magician, but rather to become one with it like the mystic.
In the fiesta or in the religious performance man attempts to change his nature, to strip himself of his own and to partic.i.p.ate in that of the divine. The Ma.s.s is a liturgy, a mystery in which the dialogue between man and his Creator culminates in communion, as well as an actualization or representation of the Pa.s.sion of Jesus Christ. If by virtue of baptism the sons of Adam acquire the liberty that allows them to make the leap between their natural state and the state of grace, through communion Christians are able, in the shadows of an ineffable mystery, to eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of their G.o.d. That is, they may nourish themselves with a divine substance, with the divine substance. The sacred feast deifies the Aztec the same as the Christian. This appet.i.te is no different from the lover"s or the poet"s. Novalis said: "Perhaps s.e.xual desire is simply desire disguised as human flesh." This thought of the German poet, who sees in woman "the most elevated corporeal nourishment," illumines for us the character of poetry and love: we try to recapture our paradisiacal nature through the medium of ritual cannibalism.
It is not strange that poetry has provoked suspicious-when not scandalized-reactions among those souls who saw pulsating within it the same appet.i.te and the same thirst that move the religious man. In contrast to religion, which exists only when it is socialized in a church, in a community of the faithful, poetry is manifested only when it is individualized, when it is embodied in a poet. Its relation to the absolute is private and personal. Religion and poetry both tend toward communion; both begin in solitude and attempt, through the means of sacred nourishment, to break that solitude and return to man his innocence. But whereas religion is profoundly conservative, sanctifying the social bond as it converts society into church, poetry breaks that bond as it consecrates an individual relation that is marginal to, if not opposed to, society. Poetry is always dissident. It needs neither theology nor clergy. It attempts neither to save man nor to build the city of G.o.d: its intent is to give us the terrestrial testimony of an experience. As an answer to the same questions and needs that religion satisfies, poetry seems to me to be a secret form-illegal, irregular-of religion: a heterodoxy, not because it does not admit dogma, but because it manifests itself in a private and many times anarchical way. In other words, religion is always social-except when it is transformed into mysticism-while poetry, at least in our era, is individual.
What is the testimony of the poetic word, strange testimony to the unity of man and world, to their original and lost ident.i.ty? First of all, it is testimony to the innate innocence of man, as religion is testimony to his lost innocence. If the one affirms sin, the other denies it. The poet reveals man"s innocence. But the poet"s testimony is valid only if it succeeds in transforming experience into expression, that is, words. And not just any words or words in any order whatever, but words in an order that is not thought, or conversation, or prayer. An order that creates its own laws and its own reality: the poem. For that reason a French critic has been able to say that, "while the poet is inclined to the word, the mystic is inclined to silence." This difference in aims is what ultimately distinguishes the mystic experience from poetic expression. Mysticism is immersion in the absolute: poetry is expression of the absolute or of the lacerating attempt to arrive at it. To what does the poet aspire when he expresses his experience? Poetry, Rimbaud said, desires to change life. It does not attempt to embellish it, as aesthetes and literati believe, or make it more just or good, as moralists dream. Through the word, through expression of his experience, the poet endeavors to make the world sacred; with the word he consecrates the experience of men and the relations between man and world, man and woman, man and his own consciousness. He does not attempt to beautify, hallow, or idealize what he comes in contact with; rather, he attempts to make it sacred. Therefore, poetry is neither moral nor immoral, just nor unjust, false nor true, beautiful nor ugly. It is, simply, poetry of solitude or of communion. Because poetry, testimony of ecstasy, of blessed love, is also testimony of despair. And it may be as much blasphemy as it is plea.
Modern society cannot forgive poetry its nature. To modern man poetry seems sacrilegious. And although this nature may be disguised, although it may take communion at a common altar and then justify its intoxication with all manner of excuses, social conscience will always reprove it, consider it deviation and dangerous madness. The poet tends to partic.i.p.ate in the absolute, like the mystic, and he tends to express it, as do liturgy and the religious festival. Since the poet"s activity does not benefit society, this pretension converts him into a dangerous being, a true parasite who, instead of attracting for its benefit the unknown forces that religion organizes and apportions, disperses them in a sterile and antisocial enterprise. In communion the poet discovers the world"s secret force, the force that religion through ecclesiastical bureaucracy attempts to channel and utilize. And the poet not only discovers this force and immerses himself in it, he also shows it to other men in all its terrifying and violent nakedness, pulsating in the word, alive in that strange mechanism called a poem. Need one add that this force, alternately sacred and d.a.m.ned, is the force of ecstasy, of vertigo, that bursts forth like sorcery at the peak of carnal or spiritual contact? At the height of that contact and in the profundity of that vertigo man and woman touch the absolute, the realm where contradictions are reconciled and life and death make a covenant on lips that meet and blend together. In that instant body and soul are one and the skin is like a new consciousness, consciousness of the infinite spilled toward the infinite . . . Touch and all other senses cease to serve pleasure or knowledge, cease to be personal; they expand, one might say, and, far from serving as antennae, as instruments of consciousness, they dissolve consciousness into the absolute, reintegrate it into original energy. Force, appet.i.te longing to exist to the limits and beyond the limits of being, hunger for eternity and s.p.a.ce, thirst that does not retreat before the fall but instead, in its vital excess and self-laceration, seeks to explore the eternal fall that reveals immobility and death, the black kingdom of oblivion; hunger for life, yes, but also for death.
Poetry is revelation of the innocence that breathes in every man and woman, innocence we may all recapture the moment love illumines our eyes and returns to us our astonishment and fecundity. Its testimony is the revelation of an experience in which all men partic.i.p.ate, an experience concealed by routine and everyday bitterness. Poets have been the first to reveal that eternity and the absolute are within the reach of our senses, not beyond them. This eternity and this reconciliation with the world are produced in time and within time, in our mortal lives, for neither love nor poetry offers us immortality or salvation. Nietzsche said: "Not eternal life, but eternal aliveness: that is what matters." A society like ours, counting among its victims its best poets, wanting only to preserve itself, to endure, a society in which self-preservation and economy are the only laws, a society that prefers renouncing life to exposing itself to change, must condemn poetry-that vital extravagance-when it cannot domesticate it with hypocritical praise. And it does condemn it, not in the name of life, which is adventure and change, but in the name of the mask of life, in the name of the instinct for preservation.
In certain epochs poetry has been able to coexist with society and its impulse has nourished the best undertakings of society. In primitive times poetry, religion, and society together formed a living and creative unity. The poet was magician and priest, and his word was divine. That unity was broken thousands of years ago-at that very moment when division of labor created a clergy and the first theocracies were born-but the schism between poetry and society was never total. The great divorcement began in the eighteenth century and coincided with the downfall of the beliefs that were the foundation of our civilization. Nothing has replaced Christianity, and for two centuries we have lived in a kind of spiritual interregnum. In our epoch poetry cannot live within what capitalistic society calls its ideals: the lives of Sh.e.l.ley, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Becquer are proofs that spare the necessity of argument. If, toward the end of the last century, Mallarme was able to create his poetry outside of society, today all poetic activity, if it is truly poetic, must oppose that society. It is not strange that for certain sensitive souls the only possible vocation is solitude or suicide; neither is it strange that for others, beautiful and pa.s.sionate, the only imaginable poetic activities are dynamite, political a.s.sa.s.sination, or the gratuitous crime. In certain cases, at least, one must have the courage to say that one sympathizes with those explosions, which are testimony of the desperation to which a social system based solely upon the conservation of the status quo, and especially economic gain, leads us.
The same vital force, lucid in the center of its darkness, moves both yesterday"s and today"s poets. Except that yesterday communion was possible, thanks perhaps to the same church that now impedes it. And it must be said: for the experience to be realized once again, a new kind of man will be necessary, and also a society in which inspiration and reason, rational and irrational forces, love and morality, the collective and the individual will be reconciled. This reconciliation occurs fully in Saint John of the Cross. One need not recall the nature of the saint"s society; everyone knows that it was one of the last epochs of human culture when, instead of opposing each other, the contradictory forces of reason and inspiration, society and the individual, religion and individual piety complemented and harmonized with each other. In the breast of that society, when perhaps for the last time in history the flame of personal piety could be nourished from the religion of society, Saint John realized the most intense and complete of experiences: communion. A little later that communion became impossible.
We can contemplate in all their truth the two extreme notes of lyric poetry, communion and solitude, throughout the history of our poetry. There are two equally impressive texts in our language, the poems of Saint John and a poem by Quevedo, "Lgrimas de un penitente" [Tears of a penitent], until now little studied by critics. The poems of Saint John relate the most profound mystic experience in our culture. It seems unnecessary to enlarge upon their significance since they are so perfect that they preclude any attempt at poetic a.n.a.lysis. Naturally, I am not saying that psychological, philosophical, or stylistic a.n.a.lysis is not possible; I am referring to the absurd pretension that attempts to explain poetry. When it achieves the perfection of "Cntico espiritual" [Spiritual canticle], poetry explains itself. The same is not true of Quevedo"s poems. In "Lgrimas de un penitente," Quevedo expresses the cert.i.tude that the poet is no longer one with his creations; he is mortally divided. Something very subtle and very powerful intrudes between poetry and the poet, between G.o.d and man: the consciousness. And what is more significant: the consciousness of that consciousness, the consciousness of self. Quevedo expresses this demoniac state in two lines: The waters of the abyss where I became enamored of myself.
At the beginning of the poem the poet, lucid sinner, refuses to be saved, rejects grace; he is attached to the world"s beauty. Facing G.o.d, he feels alone and rejects redemption, imprisoned in external appearances: Nothing undeceives me, I am bewitched by the world.
But the sinner realizes that the world that enchants him, the world to which he is so strongly bound by love . . . does not exist. The nothingness of the world reveals itself to him as something real, so that he feels himself enamored of this nothingness. It is not, however, the empty and nonexistent beauty of the world that prevents him from transcending himself and communicating; it is his consciousness of self. This feature lends an exceptional character to Quevedo"s poem in the poetic landscape of the seventeenth century; there are other more inspired, more perfect and pure poets, but this lucidity regarding self-laceration breathes in none other. One must call this lucidity Baudelairean. In effect, Quevedo says that consciousness of self is awareness that one exists in evil and nothingness, a pleasurable consciousness of evil. Thus, he attributes a sinful content to consciousness, not so much for those sins it commits in its imaginings as for its attempts to sustain itself in itself, to be sufficient unto itself alone, and alone to satiate its thirst for the absolute. While Saint John pleads with and supplicates the Loved One, Quevedo is solicited by his G.o.d. But he prefers to lose Him and lose himself rather than offer Him the only sacrifice He will accept: his consciousness. At the end of the poem a need for expiation, consisting of the mortification of the "I," surges forth: only at this price is reconciliatio