SOURCE: “The Isakower Phenomenon and the Dream Screen,” in Critical Views on Vicente Aleixandre's Poetry, edited by Vincente Cabrera and Harriet Boyer, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1979, pp. 39-46.

In the following essay, Schwartz discusses the symbolism of the subconscious in Aleixandre's poetry.

Much of the early poetry of Vicente Aleixandre reveals his view of nature and the world through subjective connotations which relate to a number of conflicts, anxieties, and unconscious fantasies. The poet clarifies some of this poetry, rooted in his unconscious depths, by combining creative and destructive impulses in the apparently ambivalent equation that love equals death. In spite of juxtaposing these and other dissimilarities, Aleixandre, through his very disorientation, which simulates the psychic processes themselves, and by indulging in a kind of free association, transmutes into artistic and understandable form a variety of thinly disguised wishes.

The sea, probably the most prevalent symbol...