SOURCE: “Vicente Aleixandre in the Context of Modern Poetry,” in Symposium, Vol. 33, 1979, pp. 118-41.

In the following essay, Fernández-Morera offers an appraisal of Aleixandre's poetry in the context of modern poetry outside of Spain.

“Spanish surrealist poet little known outside the Spanish speaking world,” “A poet the world had forgotten.”¹ Thus the New York and London Times spoke about the recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize for literature. A weary Hispanist might observe that Aleixandre is not only a surrealist poet; and that, if Spain is part of the world, Aleixandre is not a poet the world had forgotten. He might add that in 1949 Aleixandre was elected to the Spanish Academy, that in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies he was the object of important literary homages in Spain, and that poet-critics as different yet as exacting as Jorge Luis Borges and Luis Cernuda have agreed on his...