SOURCE: "Vicente Aleixandre Lights the Way," in The Christian Science Monitor, January 2, 1980, p. 17.

Der Hovanessian is an American educator, poet, and translator. In a review of A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Alxeixandre, she asserts that Aleixandre moved definitively from the dark imagery of his early work toward more hopeful and humanist poems as his career progressed.

"The poet," according to Vicente Aleixandre, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1977, "is essentially a prophet…. His job is to illumine, to aim light."

Poetry, for Aleixandre, is "a longing for the light."

Lewis Hyde uses that existential phrase as the title for Aleixandre's first volume of selected poems in English [A Longing for the Light].

Why, we might ask, since Aleixandre is 81, did it take so long for his work to appear in English? The answer: This poet, prophet or not, was neither controversial enough...