Why is the Spanish input to Surrealism so distinctive and strong? What do such renowned figures as Dal , Bu uel, Lorca, Aleixandre and Alberti have in common? This book untangles the issue of Surrealism in Spain by focusing on a consistent feature in Spanish avant-garde poetry, art and film of the late twenties and thirties: its supersaturation in religion. A repressive religious upbringing, typically under the Jesuits, intensifies both the paranoiac and the mystical - Surrealism's twin pillars - which were already deeply ingrained in the Spanish psyche. Striking examples are Lorca's prophetic voice in New York, Dal and Bu uel's Eucharistic transformations, Alberti's Loyolan materio-mysticism. Alberti is the fulcrum of this study since his poetry goes the full distance of Surrealism's evolution from Freudian catharsis to metaphysical transcendence until it expires in a Marxist reaction to church-bound tradition when his nation convulses in civil war, the surrealist ethos in Spain is not reducible to measuring how closely it imitates French theory. It is 'more serious' than the French, says Alberti, and its bearings are found on a cross of mental suffering and in a journey out of hell that made real art in practice. ROBERT HAVARD is Professor of Spanish, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

These include surrealism and the seminal role of Freud, narrative structure, genre, and lyric ancestors such as Fray Luis de Leon, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and Ruben Dario."--BOOK JACKET.

This critical study of the group of remarkably talented poets who flourished in Spain between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War includes copious quotations accompanied by English prose translations. Mr Morris treats his poets as a group, showing how they shared certain themes and attitudes. He begins with a general study of the generation as a whole and then examines the use of tradition; the zest and levity of the Jazz Age; the exaltation of life as a shared attitude; then its converse; the escape from life; and finally the expression in complex imagery of personal tensions and disturbances. These are often 'difficult' poets, but become less so when they are sympathetically examined in this way and in relation to earlier literary traditions. Mr Morris enables the reader to take bearings and establish relationships which are enhanced by reproductions of photographs of the poets.

Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time. Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry." Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature. After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief. The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.

The definitive bilingual collection of twentieth-century Spanish poetry.

This is the first book in English to examine the development of the avant-garde in Spain during the early twentieth century, across a wide range of cultural media.