1. Frontispiece

A divine hand
Raised your lands in my body
And there set a voice
That would speak your silence.

I was alone with you,
Believing in you alone;
Now to think you name
Poisons my dreams. 1 

These stanzas from Cernuda’s “A Spaniard Speaks of His Land,” make me recall that Octavio Paz once described Cernuda as the least Christian and indeed the least Spanish of Spanish poets. A member of the “Generation of 1927” (Lorca, Alberti and so many others), Cernuda can seem more an English Romantic poet than an Andalusian singer the tradition to which he was born.

Stubborn, irreconciled to any belief or ideology whatsoever, Cernuda is an extraordinarily intense example of poetic integrity and vocation. Though his inspiration was as daemonic and Orphic as theirs, Cernuda has failed to find the audience that Lorca had almost from his beginnings, and that Hart Crane has won posthumously.

Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologues had a strong effect upon Cernuda, echoes in Cernuda’s “Lazarus” and in his great odes in/of “The Clouds.” Perhaps Cernuda can be understood best as one of Browning’s obsessed monologists, another Childe Roland come to the dark tower to confront, not the expected ogre, but the ring of fire of the heroic precursors: Hölderlin, Nerval, Novalis, Blake, Goethe, Browning, Machado.

The tradition of the “High Sublime” is a difficult model to follow for post- Romantic poetry. Secular transcendence came to Cernuda as a very hard-won achievement. No other twentieth-century poet of his genius was as solitary as the exiled Cernuda. He had no life but his poetry: if the art of poetry has its saints, like Dickinson and Paul Celan, then Luis Cernuda is among them.

2. Luis Cernuda (1902-1963)

Cernuda was a central poet in the twentieth century, but he suffered from exile as no other major Spanish poet has. Several Spanish poets and critics ceased to think of him as Spanish at all. His elegy for Lorca is the best I have read, but Cernuda’s tradition was Romanticism: Goethe and Hölderlin, Blake and Novalis, Browning and Leopardi, Baudelaire and Nerval, and in his final phase, T.S. Eliot, accurately viewed as one of the Late Romantics. Of all the great Spanish poets, I think Cernuda was the most alienated: from Spain, from Catholicism, and from much of the national literary tradition.

If I think of the Sublime mode, in Romanticism and after, Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Cernuda come first to my mind. But Shelley and Hugo were revolutionary partisans: Cernuda, isolated in and from Mexico, lived as sublime a solitude as those of Hölderlin and Nerval, and attempts no large social subjects. His concern is his own consciousness.

Whatever ambigüities Whitman and Pessoa had in regard to their homoeroticism vanish in the aggressive homosexuality of Lorca and Hart Crane, but neither Lorca nor Crane employ their sexual orientation as a critique of societal morals and manners. Quietly embittered, Cernuda does, in ways than further enhanced the sense of sublime isolation in his strongest poems.

In his brief talk “Words before a Reading” (1935), Cernuda faced a public for the first time His remarks, hermetic and self-directed, must have baffled his audience:

The poetic instinct was awakened in me thanks to a more acute perception of reality- experiencing with a deeper echo the beauty and the attraction of the surrounding world. Its effect, as in some way occurs with the desire which provokes love, was the necessity- painful because of its intensity- of getting outside myself, negating myself in the vast body of creation. And what made that desire even more agonizing was the tactic recognition that it was impossible to satisfy it.  2 

From this impasse, Cernuda leaps to the daemonic, the subject of my study. Like the poetic, he insists, it cannot be defined, but it resembles the remark of a Sufi sage, who hears the sound of a flute and announces: “That is the voice of Satan, who weeps over the world, “who laments, like the poet, the destruction of beauty. In the same spirit, Cernuda ends his talk by asking what answer a poet can expect in this world, and he replies that there is none.

This negativity is Cernuda’s starting- point, and led him on to a pure poetry, which could have only a few readers. He reminds me of Alvin Feinman, a sparse poet of authentic genius in my own generation, except that Cernuda went on to a great handful of sublime odes: “The poet’s Glory,” “To the Statues of the Gods,” “To a Dead Poet “(an elegy for Lorca), “The Visitation of God, ““Lazarus,” “Ruins,” and his masterpiece, “Apologia Pro Vita Sua.” These are difficult poems, but Cernuda- like Hart Crane- is one of the most difficult of modern poets. Crane’s difficulties emanate from his invocatory surge and his “logic of metaphor,”and so do Cernuda’s, who may never have heard of Crane, though for a poet who died in Mexico a third of a century beyond Crane’s stormy sojourn there, that seems to me unlikely. Whatever Crane’s affinities with Pessoa, his family resemblance with the Cernuda of Invocations (1934-1935) runs much deeper, except that Cernuda’s bitterness stands apart, a negativity so profound that only Nietzsche or Leopardi can rival it. Whitman, who activated Pessoa and stirred Crane and Lorca, had no effect upon Cernuda, who preferred the formalistic T.S.Eliot, despite Eliot’s Christian orthodoxy. I think Whitman would have benefited Cernuda, as he did Paz, Borges, Neruda and Vallejo, but the temperamental bitterness of Cernuda was too intense to absorb what moves me most in Whitman, the vitalistic, Falstaffian force that affirm life’s perpetual renewal:

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

At his most impressive, Cernuda is the polar opposite of this magnificent vitalism. He invokes instead a post- Baudelairean contempt for the unimaginative life:

Listen to their marmoreal precepts
On the useful, the normal, the beautiful;
Listen to them dictate law to the world, fix the norms of love, give
    rules for ineffable beauty,
While they delight their sense with delirious loudspeakers;
Contemplate their strange minds,
Attempting to raise, son by son, a complex edifice of sand
Whose grim, livid façade would negate the refulgent peace of the stars.

These, my brother,
Surround my solitary dying-
Specters that someday will spawn
The solemn scholar, the oracle
Who will display my words for alien students,
And therewith gaining renown,
Get a little country place in the tortuous mountains
Near the capital.
While behind your rainbow fog
You stroke your curly hair
And from the heights distractedly contemplate This filthy earth where the poet slowly suffocates.  3 

The Demon brother addressed may be Baudelaire himself, but more likely it is Cernuda’s own genius, his daemon, his “poet’s glory.” Cernuda, like Shelley and Stevens, is a Lucretian poet, and his invocation of the gods properly sees them as remote from humankind. Cernuda’s Sublime, Atlantic only in its high negations, culminates in his elegy for Lorca, which attributes the Fascist motive for murder to have being a hatred for poetry. And yet Lorca was shot side by side with a poor schoolteacher, as the Falange followed its program of “Death to the intellect!” Cernuda’s passionate misperception does not weaken the sublime pathos of his lament for a unique value destroyed in its prime:

You were the green in our barren land,
And the blue in our dark air. 4 

The poetic hyperbole takes its force partly from Cernuda’s generous pathos of implicitly recognizing his own limitations in contrast to the natural, extraordinary vitality of Lorca. No one, elegizing Cernuda, would have found in him the earth’s green, the sky’s blue. His power, always against the grain and remorseless, centered itself elsewhere.