INTRODUCCIÓN

In the previous chapter we examined the effect of Cernuda's reading of Browning upon his own poetry, and suggested that the influence of the latter on the former's technique, in particular, though considerable, was not always beneficial, given the very different temperaments of the two men, and the natural persistence in Cernuda of almost innate stylistic habits. The case of Yeats provides a complete contrast in this regard, so much so that one must give very careful consideration to Cernuda's claim that what he derived from his experience of English literature was not the guidance of influence, in the sense of instruction, but a sense of kinship, of happy coincidence, which confirmed, rather than conformed, his own poetic theory and practice. However, in view of the almost pathological truculence of Cernuda's personality, especially where debts were concerned[1], we would do well to tread warily in considering the undisputed fact of the intersection of his creative trajectory with that of a number of English language poets.

In order understand Cernuda's extreme sensitivity on the question of influences, we must go back to the earliest phase of his career. The critical reception accorded to his first collection, Perfil del aire, opened a wound which was never properly to heal and, though the matter has been sensibly and sensitively dealt with by Derek Harris[2], it is enlightening, for our purposes, to glance briefly at the elaborate defence of his own independence which Cernuda constructed in the “diálogo ejemplar” entitled El crítico, el amigo y el poeta[3]. If one considers that, when this dialogue appeared, over twenty years had elapsed since the publication of Perfil, one gets some idea of the impact early adverse criticism had on him and of the obsessive desire to extricate himself from what he saw as the damning implications of discipleship. He is most categorical and most convincing when dismissing the idea that he was imitating Guillén, and Harris corroborates this, greatly reducing the extent of the possible influence of the author of Cántico[4].

But Cernuda goes further, quite properly pointing to the influence of Mallarind, and adding for good measure the names of G6ngora, Garcilaso, Manrique, Aldana, Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Quevedo and Calderón. A careful reading of Perfil, and of the definitive versions of the poems entitled Primeras poesíass in the complete works, shows that Cernuda only slightly exaggerates. It is also true that, in later collections, all these influences, and more, are entirely apparent, so that Cernuda's argument, allowing for a telescoping of the time sequence, is in the end vindicated. The problem arises, however, with his introduction of the concept of “tradition” as a global term to cover every variety of influence. It seems clear that Cernuda benefitted in this dialogue from Eliot's important essay, oTradition and the Individual Talent”[5], though he perhaps unnecessarily restricts the scope of the concept of tradition in his own use of the term.

Aunque no podemos escoger nuestra tradición, podemos y debemos descubrirla y hacerla nuestra, porque no basta con heredarla.[6]

And this is the point: the word “heredar” limits the range of the possible tradition, which is virtually confined to the poets of one's native language, or, at the outside, can include only those foreign authors appearing in the tradition through the fitter of a genuine” member who stamps the newcomer with his authority. Such is the case of Mallarmé, who enters Cernuda's tradition via Góngora:

Precisamente por Góngora fue a Mallarmé, y por Góngora halló familiar alguna parte de la poesia francesa.

This restriction of Eliot's more generous notion of tradition explains the intemperance of “el amigo's” reply to the critic's leading question:

“Pero en su amigo Cernuda hay diferentes y más tardías influencias extranjeras”, the critic smoothly points out, and it is almost with a snarl that the friend rounds on him:

¿A qué cansarnos enumerando todas las influencias posibles que sobre él actuaron? ¿No bastaría con decir que Cernuda estuvo vivo, y aprendió de todos aquellos de quienes tenía que aprender, y también, y no poco, de sí mismo?[7]

Of course Cernuda learned from himself and by himself, and of course it would be absurd to plod through his poems, line by line and page by page, gleaning whatever scraps of influence, coincidence or imitation happened to offer themselves. But Cernuda's poetry is remarkable not only for its quality and its profound originality, but also because, like the work of other great modern poets –and Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Pessoa and Kavafis are only the most obvious examples– in its characteristic operation it tends to draw the strands of experience into a tighter pattern, an encompassing form of art as a distinct manifestation of awareness. Art is thus postulated as a unique way of registering experience coherently, and this almost inevitably means that its points of reference are other works of art, other theories of artistic value, and the general notion that the history of a people is the history of its culture.

Such poetry is naturally allusive, intricate, vibrant with the echoes and reverberations of the voices of living and dead artist. It forms clusters, pockets of significance, “radiating centres”[8] in apparent isolation. It is the reader's task to piece these together, to gather the fragments and rearrange them until they form a whole tense with significance. And not from any gratuitous desire for modishness or spurious modernity, but because the disintegration of the sensibility (or its “dissociation”, as Eliot phrased it) and the fragmentation of experience is the profoundest, the most marked mode of the life of the twentieth-century mind, at least in the first five decades.

The immediate causes of this state of affairs are well known, and it is almost trite to rehearse them here. The enormous advances of technology have an intimidating and belittling effect on the psyche; the progress of biology and psychology has disrupted traditional notions of the nature and limitations of man; the erosion of traditional forms of religion has left our status in the universe un certain; and the enormous barbarity and cruelty displayed most significantly in the two world wars questions to the very depths the value of what we are fond of calling “civilisation”, together with its concomitant ethical considerations.[9]

It is in this context that Cernuda's poetry is to be understood. If his work represents, in Octavio Paz's felicitous phrase, a “biografia espiritual”[10], it is in the same sense as Pound's “periplum” stands for the voyage of a mind over experience, for a sailing after knowledge. These voyages of discovery lead the poet into the realm of the unknown, and what he fishes up may be what Yeats called “rich dark nothings” which can only be interpreted in the light of a significant tradition, a tradition which the poet will have to construct for himself. Such spiritual biography may, therefore, be exemplary, but not didactic in the manner of, say, Dryden or Pope, or even Wordsworth or Shelley. There is an ethical dimension, but it is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic, and is as different from traditional morality -even in the religious poetry of Eliot- as Yeats's technique in “Meditations in Time of Civil War” is from Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode”.

This is not to say that Cernuda's poetry agrees at all points with the scheme we have developed here, but no other Spanish poet of his time came into such dynamic contact with the experiments in poetry then going forward in western Europe and America, and it is this new awareness of the poem as an artefact made by the mind working, under pressure, on experience, rather than as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, that is clearly stamped on the poetry of his early middle age, written in Britain and the United States. Of the three poets we have mentioned, Yeats was closest to Cernuda precisely because he was the least “advanced” in his handling of modern poetics, as we shall be seeing.

As to the reasons why Cernuda should, if not quite deny English influences, at least try to throw his reader off the scent, one can only surmise that he feared a repetition of the hostility he thought he detected in the Guillón episode, and since the work of the English poets was not, in his view, well known in Spain, he was worried that to the charges of evasiveness, irascibility, coldness and hypersensitivity made against him personally would be added the damning one of obscurity in his poetry. But he cannot, in all honesty, have been unaware of the fascination certain English poets exercised over him, and he cannot have expected the averagely careful reader, with the right sort of information, to miss these influences in his work.

It is, therefore, instructive to see how he deals with the question of influences as they affect another Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez. In a brief essay entitled “Jiménez y Yeats”[11], he discusses the similarity of theme in Jiménez's “Vino, primero, pura” and Yeats's “A Coat”, and he bends over backwards to deny what he had earlier seemed to be taking pains to establish, namely that Jiménez quite possibly imitated Yeats in his poem. His argument is elaborate:

Acaso no se trate de “influencia” ni, mucho menos, de “imitación”. Ocurre a veces en la historia literaria el caso de que un poeta, leyendo a otro, puede encontrarse frente a una experiencia que refleja la suya propia, aunque no se hubiera antes dado cuenta de habérsela experimentado. “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,” pudo haber dicho Juan Ramón Jiménez al leer “A Coat”.

But surely this selection by a poet of material from another which he finds suitable to his purposes is precisely what we call influence –imitation or adaptation as the case may be. Moreover, these remarks are one of those breathtaking reversals which are so common in Cernuda, and which probably reflect both the acrimony of his character and his more controlled and more permanent sense of the demands of justice and scrupulous honesty; for, two years earlier, in his essay on Yeats, he had specifically referred to the imprint of Yeats on Jiménez as “sus coincidencias con J. R. Jiménez o, más bien, sus repercusiones en Jiménez.”[12] This looks like a classic case of seeing the speck in one's neighbour's eye and not seeing the beam in one's own.

In any case, given Cernuda's prevarication on the question of influences, we are thrown back on our own impartial examination of the facts. But as it happens there are coincidences in this case between the two poets, though not of the kind Cernuda meant. It has more to do with similarities of character and attitude, and an odd similarity in their poetic development, which may have struck Cernuda from the start.

Both poets started out on a slightly naive though earnest Romantic note, which lasted longer in Yeats than in Cernuda. Yeats's misty, visión-haunted pre-Raphaelism, with his evocations of mythical Irish heroes and folk tales, is, of course, very different from Cernuda's intimate compositions on the themes of adolescent desire (Primeras poesías), the groves of Arcady (Égloga) and the pain of vanished love (Donde habite el olvido); but these early attempts are, as it were, equivalent, allowing for the changes in aesthetic taste over a period of forty years or so. In each case, this phase is followed by an intermediate or transitional volume, which for Yeats was The Green Helmet, and Other Poems (1910) and for Cernuda was Invocaciones (1934-5), marking for both the discovery of what are to be their most characteristic themes: “A Woman Homer Sung”, “No Second Troy”, “The Fascination of What's Difficult”, “The Mask”, and “All Things Can Tempt Me” in Yeats's volume, and “A un muchacho andaluz”, “Soliloquio del farero”, “La gloria del poeta”, “Dans Ma Péniche” and “A las estatuas de los dioses” in Cernuda's, adumbrate themes both return to again and again in their maturity.

The next stage, crucial for both, is reached by way of what we may broadly call politics. Yeats's collection Responsibilities was published in 1914, the year the First World War broke out, and in both title and contents it displays a new awareness of the immediate problems of day-to-day living in an Ireland threatened by war from the outside, and by ominous rumblings within. (Easter 1916 in only two years off, and the civil war, though somewhat more distant, is becoming a distinct possibility.) As we already know, Cernuda's equivalent volume, Las nubes, was born directly out of his reactions to the civil war, and was finished in exile. It is less restrained than Yeats's collection, amongst other reasons because, in the case of Spain, the war had come comparatively suddenly and its effects were, in consequence, the more brutal for the individual mind reflecting on them.

These national conflicts had cataclysmic consequences for both men, involving a dramatic reappraisal of aesthetic values and poetic techniques. Out of their passionate commitment to idealised visions of their native countries torn by internal strife sprang the seed from which the best poetry of both was to grow.

One difference, we have already suggested in another context: whereas Yeats's poetry grew steadily in precision and authority virtually until he died –masterpieces like “Long-legged Fly”, “John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore” and “The Circus Animals' Desertion” are from his last years– Cernuda's last poems deteriorate into irritability, prosiness and a destructive personal animosity, the result, probably, of spiritual exhaustion, disillusionment and aloof unhappiness.

As for the occasional similarity of tone or attitude, we have already dwelt at some length on Cernuda's habitual haughtiness and acerbity. In Yeats there is a frequent tone of autocratic pride –which has made him the butt of many a “mocking tale or a jibe” in certain intellectual circles in Ireland– and to this arrogance, on occasion, unrestrained anger is added. Words like “anger”, “Krage”, “frenzy”, “passion”, “hatred”, etc., spill out of Yeats's mature poetry with such abandon that one might think them, on this evidence alone, the ravings of a dotard, the splenetic outpourings of a soul dissatisfied with itself and its lot. Though there is some truth in this, it must be added that the energy of the passion is often self-directed, and is closely linked both with a frequent pose of Yeats's and with an important element in his ethical system and, paradoxically, in his concept of love.

For the moment, it will be sufficient to note that, in the last works of each poet, what, in Cernuda, is often mere grumpiness or spite is commonly, in Yeats, a willed rage, the splendid anger of Lear or Timon, both of whom are present in “An Acre of Grass”:

Here we notice Yeats's typical association of fierceness of spirit with clarity of visión; the ferocity is concentration and intensity rather than impotent rage, and the vision is essentially poetic. The truth involved is the truth as Blake conceived it, i.e. the truth, not of mathematics and of philosophy, but of the imagination (insofar as this excludes a certain idea of philosophic truth). Blake, Michael Angelo, Lear and Timon are the chosen emblems of the artist because what they have in common is concentrated energy, the single-mindedness of sheer will which represents the imagination working at the height of its power. The barriers concealing truth can be broken down by the mind alone, but apparently this might can set the dead trembling, for, in “All Souls' Night”, communion with the dead is essential to a right knowledge of the living, and tenacity of thought is required to achieve it:

However, Yeats's highly individual combination of passionate energy with poetic revelation and abstract thought –culminating in the notion of the poet as seer, inherited from Blake and the Biblical tradition of frenzied, physical prophets– though it is very different from anything we find in the pensive, intimate attitude of Cernuda's meditative poetry, is only one feature of his complex and highly flexible handling of the mask of the ageing poet. In other manifestations, this mask is the means he chooses to objectify his ethical aims. One of his most characteristic themes at such times, and one that Cernuda takes over from him, is the persistence of sexual desire in old age. These two features coalesce, in both poets, in their development of the theme of time and its destructive effects on beauty, leading in both to an ultimately tragic vision of human life.

Before we examine the specific coincidences between the two, it may be useful to consider Cernuda's evaluation of the work of the Irish poet, concentrating on the features Cernuda consciously held to be paramount in Yeats's poetry, though without ignoring the question of Cernuda's judgements of Yeats's opinions and interests.

Among Cernuda's pronouncements on Yeats, the simplest is that included in “Entrevista con un poeta”[15]. Asked to name his favourite modern poets, Cernuda included Yeats among them, adding “aunque su nacionamismo irlandés me parezca exagerado, así como antipática la parte de seudofascismo de su ideología.” The latter part of this remark has probably lost much of its sting for the modern reader of Yeats, thought it is interesting confirmation of the ideological fidelity of Cernuda at this period. Nevertheless, it is doubtful, whatever one may think of Yeats's peculiar stances on crucial political matters, whether Cernuda is doing more than to repeat literary gossip, as he makes no further mention of the issue in his writings on Yeats.

However, the matter of Yeats's Irish nationalism is alluded to in Cernuda's essay “Yeats”, written in 1960[16], and it is important both because of the specifically Irish nature of so much of Yeats's writing, and because of Cernuda's little-known intimate patriotism, which we discussed in the previous chapter. Cernuda is explicit and contemptuous in his dismissal of Yeats's nationalist feelings:

Otra cuestión a tener en cuenta respecto de Yeats es la de que todo lo que escribe en cuanto irlandés lo escribe para servir a la causa nacional de Irlanda y de su independencia ( ... ) De ahí el nacionalismo a ultranza (una de las cualidades menos simpáticas en Yeats para quien esto escribe) y su antipatía hacia Inglaterra, adonde por lo demás pasó largas temporadas y donde tuvo no pocos amigos. Es cierto que Inglaterra tiene una deuda histórica con Irlanda, a la que oprimió durante siglos; mas por su parte Irlanda, al menos para alguien como yo, poco enterado acerca de dicho pais, no parece haber tenido otra razón para existir que su tenaz oposición a Inglaterra.[17]

Now it is one thing for Cernuda to express his distaste at what he obviously considered the exaggeration of Yeats's nationalism, and quite another for him to speak so disparagingly of a country about which he confesses to be absolutely ignorant, especially in this astonishingly indelicate and naive way. His casual dismissal of Ireland's raison d'être is anything but enlightened; this is hardly a liberating stance for an exile who had experienced in his own person the effects of political oppression. One is, therefore, forced to recall Cernuda's irrationally high regard for Castile's history, not excluding its policy of domination; and the suspicion cannot be avoided that Cernuda is here seeing Ireland from the metropolitan's point of view, with all the prejudice and limitation that implies.

He now compounds the insult with a boutade which is halfway between ignorance and something much coarser, delivered as a footnote to the foregoing:

“Recuerdo haber visto una antología titulada ‘Mil años de poesía irlandesa’.’C'est un peu trop.’”

This remark is, if anything, in worse taste than the previous one, since it disparages an entire culture by ignoring it. A few seconds of reflection, or a simple question put to almost any inhabitant of the English-speaking world, would have provided him with the information that Ireland has an ancient culture and language of her own, and that the English connection is of comparatively recent date. What a difference from the ecstasy of the thousand years of Castile!

Of course, the real point here is not Cernuda's distorted view of Irish history, but the resultant distorsion of his reading of Yeats's poetry, much of which involves a personal and anguished response to the plight of the nation, and commands the reader's respect, if nothing else. A brief glance down the list of titles of Yeats's Collected Poems will give an idea, albeit an imperfect one, of how much Cernuda was cutting himself off from. Crucially, this list of “proscribed” poems would necessarily include the bulk of Yeats's work on political themes, and, as we have mentioned, it was precisely through his acceptance of a social and public rô1e, and the sense of commitment to a suprapersonal ideal in Responsibilities and thereafter that Yeats's poetry moved away from late Romanticism into the realm of modern poetry. In fact, a poem like “Easter, 1916”, though considerably later (Michael Robartes and the Dancer, to which it belongs, was published in 1921) turns on the tensions of a mind torn between a private worship of love, beauty and innocence, and a reluctant but clear-eyed admiration of genuine sacrifice for the sake of a political cause.

The ambiguous image of “the stone in the midst of all”, the honest doubt as to the motives of Pearse and his comrades (perhaps “excess of love/Bewildered them till they died' or perhaps “Too long a sacrifice” made “a stone of the heart”) and the oxymoron of the refrain “A terrible beauty is born” sustain the ambiguity of the response, but a climax is reached in the poet's soaring sense of kinship, beautifully expressed in the joy and the pride of the line of poetic benediction that finally unites the personal artistic ideal and the political theme:

Cernuda's surprising insensitivity to some ramifications of the political theme in Yeats somewhat blurs his view of what was most fundamentally modern and original in Yeats's mature poetry. The American poet and critic M. L. Rosenthal finds, in discursing Yeats's “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” , that the image of the swan that “ has leaped into the desolate heaven” is

the point of deepest internalization of all the motifs of the twin sequence into the dreaming knowledge of the speaking self. Man seeks to recreate himself socially through politics and personally through art, and in both cases comes up against the intransigence of impersonal progress.[19]

Rosenthal links this openness to knowledge in the widest sense with the “magnificent, doomed adventure” of Odysseus that is the starting point and one of the central references of Pound's Cantos, and with the creative enterprises of Eliot and Joyce. This has implications not only for the tensions within the poem itself, but for the poet's whole attitude towards poetry, for

the explorations of a Pound or a Yeats are, after all, serious efforts to place their objectified awareness in a purview beyond the merely personal.[20]

To be fair, Cernuda does recognise the value of Yeats's “theatre business, management of men”, and the perspectives which this active life gave him for the development of his poetry, though he perhaps oversimplifies in his admiration. Declaring the superiority of Yeats over Jiménez, he suggest that the latter was too exclusively preoccupied with beauty as the prerogative of poetry, and the poetic adjunct par excellence:

Pero además del estético, hay otro campo decisivo para la función poética, que Jiménez no tuvo en cuenta, prefiriendo siempre su vida propia y anteponiéndola a todo: el campo de lo ético.[21]

He goes on to write that Yeats's aestheticism, gave way to a more mature and more fulfilling attitude, thanks to his “dura formación humana” as a Republican senator and director of the Abbey Theatre, in contrast with Jiménez's easy life.

Though this is somewhat simplistic in its suggestion that Yeats learned the moral virtues through his experience of the value of hard work, and though it also fails to see that Yeats's new awareness has repercussions for the poet's whole conception of life and its relationship with poetry –and not only as a thematic extension or a general raising of the tone, A la Wordsworth– it accords with Octavio Paz's important judgement of Cernuda's Own poetry. For Paz, the fundamental value of this poetry is the ethical intention it reveals:

La obra de Cernuda es un camino hacia nosotros mismos. En esto radica su valor moral. Pues aparte de ser un alto poeta –o más bien: por serlo Cernuda es uno de los poquísimos moralistas que ha dado España, en el sentido en que Nietzsche es el moralista de la Europa moderna, y, como él decía, “su primer psicólogo”. La poesía de Cernuda es una crítica de nuestros valores y creencias ( ... ) Como la de Pessoa, su obra es una subversión y su fecundidad espiritual consiste, precisamente, en que pone a prueba los sistemas de la moral colectiva, tanto los fundados en la autoridad de la tradición como los que nos proponen los reformadores sociales.[22]

Lest there should be any misunderstanding of the sense in which he is using “moralist”, Paz shortly afterwards defines precisely what he means by stressing the ethical nature of this poetry. The consonance with the position of Yeats, which we are suggesting is more than mere coincidence, as well as the seminal importance of Paz's essay, perhaps excuse a further lengthy quotation from the Mexican critic:

Pocos poetas modernos, en cualquier lengua, nos dan esta sensación escalofriante de sabernos ante un hombre que habla de verdad, efectivamente poseído por la fatalidad y la lucidez de la pasión. Si se pudiese definir en una frase el sitio que ocupa Cernuda en la poesía moderna de nuestro idioma, yo diría que es el poeta que habla no para todos, sino para el cada uno que somos todos ( ... ) La poesía de Cernuda es un conocerse a sí mismo pero, en la misma intensidad, es una tentativa por crear su propia imagen.[23]

Passion and lucidity, then, are allied to a pressing critical awareness of the inadequacy of our common modes of thought and self-analysis, but the questioning of values, in both poets, is less a question of speaking the truth than of speaking truthfully (“habla de verdad”, Paz incisively says of Cernuda, and this time the emphasis in mine). In both, too, the idea is clearly present that this superior awareness is possible only in the mind of the artist, who is in communication with a tradition and thus is peculiarly receptive to voices which are not always audible to the living and not necessarily limited by the bounds of nature or reality. In fact, such poetic correspondences, to use Baudelaire's term in a slightly altered context, may have more in common with the modes of silence than with those of speech, or with the dead or the yet unborn rather than with the living. We have already noticed this, in passing, In Yeats's “All Souls' Night”. The same poem affords us a more exact statement of the idea:

The important point here is that the poet's raptness, his state of absolute receptivity, is more in the nature of an intuition than of a revelation. The poem communicates rather the urgency and the exaltation of the poet's knowledge that he is in possession of form –or is possessed by form– than of the ultimate significance of that form. Such a vision is significantly different from Keats's “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”, for despite the variety of interpretations of this disputed passage[25], it is clear that Keats is playing, at least partly, on conventional philosophic values of these terms, whereas Yeats, like Cernuda after him, is concerned more with the nature of poetic vision than of its determinable relation with nonpoetic reality. The “holding tight” on to the meditative vision, and the consciousness that that vision is perhaps alien to common experience, are more important than its specific objects.

Cernuda absolutely agrees with Yeats on this. In the ruminative “Otros tulipanes amarillos”, brooding on the image of a long-departed lover, he finally comes to a “mummy thought” of dimensions comparable to Yeats's:

We shall return shortly to the importance, for both, of the time dimension. Meanwhile, to support the argument that the work of the two poets exhibits unusual parallelism, it would be helpful to set, side by side with the passage quoted from Yeats, the following from “Noche del hombre y su demonio” :

Leaving aside the matter of Cernuda's Satanism –perhaps too deliberately Romantic and Baudelairian, and possibly, as we have suggested, overstated by a critic like Luis Antonio de Villena– one immediately sees the moral sense behind Cernuda's criticism of the common mortal's diminished feeling of responsibility, dramatically linked to a courageous assumption of the existential anguish that is the poet's lot (“puro” here can have no other meaningful sense).

If we now take this poem and “Otros tulipanes amarillos” together, we obtain a statement of the experience of poetic visión very much akin to Yeats's in “All Souls'Night”: ecstasy; communion with the dead as representatives of the past; the anguish of separation from common experience; and the intuition that the only resolution is the artistic one, the poem itself. Rosenthal holds that

Our key modern aesthetic equation is “realisation = resolution” . And realisation is the kick of life, the quickened arousal of emotional consciousness that puts a complex of awareness in perspective.[28]

Accepting that this “ complex of awareness” includes both the particular experience which the poem begins from and the intuitive grasp of what Cernuda, in “Vereda del cuco”, calls “La realidad profunda/Intima y perdurabley” , we approach an encompassing vision of art that identifies, for both poets, the experiences of love and creation. The fountain in which the poet drank of love –which is partly self-love– proves to be a source of Platonic vision:

At first sight, this appears to be merely a restatement of the Romantic commonplace, earlier phrased as

But Cernuda's metaphysics of love, later more tellingly set out in “Poemas para un cuerpo”, identifies a single source of love, death and poetry. Though the shadow of Quevedo looms over the lines

the vision goes beyond the Metaphysical conceit of the identity of Eros and Thanatos (“Aceptando la muerte para crear la vida”) and points instead to the primacy of the aesthetic ideal:

Cernuda is clearly indebted to German Romanticism, in general, and to Hö1derlin in particular, for this modern combination of the “Weltanschauung” of Heraclitus and Plato, but it is doubtful whether he would have departed from these sources in quite the way he does had it not been for his reading of Yeats. In “The Tower”, Yeats had meditated in very similar terms on identical themes. His starting point, implicit in Cernuda (“Cuántas veces han ido en otro tiempo/ Camino de esta fuente....”) is the continuing pressure of desire and its obscure relation with death, but, with the discovery of the intimate relation between sexual possession and knowledge, Yeats arrives at the centre of the quarrel between individual experience and speculative thought. His poem, like Cernuda's, is couched in terms of self-address:

“Vereda del cuco” even recalls incidental details of “The Tower”, as, for example, when Cernuda writes:

–but this hardly stills the echo. What follows, in the magnificent third section, contains the embryo of Cernuda's whole poem:

Of course, Cernuda has not taken over the specifically Yeatsian notion of “translunar paradise”, which, in the system set out in A Vision, includes occult and spiritualist elements; nor do we catch in Cernuda the slightly archaic tone in which Greek and Roman culture are referred to. Indeed, Cernuda speaks without admiration, even without much patience, of Yeats's enterprise in A Vision though he adds, with more perception than many later commentators, that Yeats's interest in the occult provided him with useful experiences for his poetry:

Pero no fue la poesía interés único en la vida de Yeats; algo más le atraía y le ocupaba, y tal vez ese otro interés benefició al poeta, aunque a algunos nos parezca, acaso por ignorancia del tema, cosa pueril. Ese interés era el de la magia, ocultismo, teosofía o como quiera llamársele.[34]

In any case, the similarities between the two poets are more striking than the differences. In both, the dream of art is a result of the concentration of the mind upon the past, both personal and cultural, and the experience of love is crucially involved in the image of reality which the “bitter soul” and the passionate heart produce. Plato is a recurrent figure in Yeats's later poetry, and a felt presence in Cernuda's; but both ultimately reject the Platonic idea as too abstract, and incompatible with the tragic experience of love. Yeats's rejection is specific in “Among School Children”:

and are thus equated with the earlier self-mocking image –something, it need hardly be said, we do not find in Cernuda– when the poet had dismissed the vain memories of his own youthful beauty to assume the reassuringly realistic rô1e of “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.” Like the ending of “Vereda del cuco., that of “Among School Children” exalts the aesthetic vision in terms that tend to keep the sensual experience of love very much before the reader:

There are thus aesthetic, sensual and mystical elements in combination in both poems, but before we leave “Vereda del cuco” it is worth looking at one last, faint echo of Yeats's manner which haunts the final verses, and which recalls the two Byzantium poems. “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium” are, of course, two of Yeats's best known poems, and were written respectively before and after Among School Childrem” and “The Tower”, which we have suggested as sources for Cernuda's poem. Furthermore, as Cernuda translated “Byzantium”, it seems reasonable to assume that he knew both this and its companion piece well, and was probably attracted by them.

The theme of both is art and its relation to time, and they examine the individual's experience of the process of ageing, the flux of historical time and the continuing lash of desire, “the fury and the mire of human veins.. In the earlier poem, the speaker addresses the “sages standing in God's holy fire”, begging them to draw him into supranatural union with them:

However, this is no pious desire for union with the God of conventional piety, but a plea for admittance into the undying realm of form (“such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/Of hammered gold and gold enamellingo), i.e. the form of living image in art. The colder “Byzantium- intellectualises these images (“miracle, bird or golden handiwork”) but retains the purifying fire as the central symbol of artistic achievement:

The intensity of these images, and their crucial rôle in these important and powerful poems, are what Cernuda was remembering in the closing lines of “Vereda del cuco” , which I repeat here given the changed light in which we are regarding them:

The parallels seem to me almost eerily exact. Allowing for incidental differences of tone, and alterations in the category of the images, the function of the image and the direction of the thought are remarkably alike. Cernuda also posits a community of privileged spirits who, following their impassioned intuitions of suprasensible reality attained through experiences of love, fly (eastwards) away from the sublunary disasters of change, rupture or complexity. The image of the phoenix is only superficially different from Yeats's presiding divinity, for the fabulous bird is God-like in its miraculous capacity to transcend death; it also recalls Yeats's golden birds which have been shaped into thetranscending forms of art. And, of course, Yeats's sages are recognisable in Cernuda's “Dueños del sortilegio,/Conocedores del fuego originario”, for they too are guardians of the sacred and purifying flame as well as products of its power.

Thus, though, as we said earlier, it is sometimes quite difficult to decide whether resonances in Cernuda's poetry are mere coincidence or actual influence, and though it is naturally impossible to determine whether even such clear correlations between the work of the two poets as we have been discussing here is conscious or unconscious “influence”, there is no real doubt that something is transferred from one poet to the other. Moreover, the status of Yeats's poetry was such even in his own lifetime that it must have exerted a very powerful attraction over the rapidly maturing mind of Cernuda. And Cernuda shows himself to be an intelligent and incisive critic and commentator of other people's work, apart from some natural, though not always very attractive, personal hostilities. His judgement of the value of Yeats's work was accurate, and his intuition of its considerable possibilities as a model, or perhaps more strictly, as guidance for his own practice, must obviously have been based on a correct perception of the features of Yeats's poetry which were already, and coincidentally, present or latent in his own.

Some of these “coincidences”, we have already mentioned, but something should now be said about two related questions, concerning, respectively, thematic and stylistic parallels.

By thematic parallels, I mean the effect given by both poets of returning time and time again to a fairly tight little groups of common major themes, and reworking them in accordance with their growing grasp of their craft, the intensity of their experience or the fluctuating power of their intuition. In both poets, the principal themes are love, time, death and art, and it would be reasonable to assume, on the basis of the immediately preceding argument, that Cernuda, having noticed Yeats's fondness for these themes of his own –which, naturally, interested him long before he had ever read a page of Yeats– began to examine Yeats's handling of them and, in the process, picked up hints about their possibilities and their interrelations.

We have been discussing the combination in both poets of the themes of art and love;´in particular, but one characteristic theme of Cernuda's, which all his major critics have discussed, is that of time. In a recent article, I outlined the idea of an active principle in his poetry, which he repeatedly designates “la mirada”, but which has obvious connections, for the English-speaking reader, with the Romantics' Imagination and Wordsworth's “inward eye”[38]. The deployment of this restlessly investigative principle between the world of nature and the realm of cognition instantly produces a feeling of strangeness, isolation and solitude, but the anguish of estrangement from the apparent unity of the world of inanimate nature is compensated for, though never eliminated, by the sudden intuition of analogies and correspondences, what Cernuda calls “posibles paraísos”[39] which constitute the basis of the poetic experience of beauty. But, with the realisation that beauty, too, is subject to decay, the countervailing force of temporality asserts itself, and in this one-sided battle, the imagination returns to its (original?) home in the mind, and the idea of beauty is the more lovingly asserted in art for the poet's intuitive understanding of its evanescence.

Though, clearly, there is neither time nor place in an essay of this scope for anything more than a broad outline of this complex issue, it does seem important to stress the philosophical basis of the time theme in both Yeats and Cernuda especially as the latter, in particular, is too often decribed as a “Romantic”, poet, with the accompanying suspicion that this may mean, somehow, a naive poet, a species of gifted warbler[40].

Diego Romero de Solís, in a recent essay on the philosophical basis of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry[41], puts the matter this way:

La poética arranca de lo posible y lo soñado, de una ensoñación especulativa que la conciencia ontológica no ya sugiere, sino que exige como necesidad (necesidad de un juego intelectual de una sensibilidad que sustente una imaginación corporeizada). Hay un vacío en la existencia que tan sólo la creación puede llenar –el sentido trágico de la “poiesis”– como reconstrucción imaginaria que la razón ha de armonizar en el análisis de la realidad. Al vacío del espíritu que del tedio pasa a la desesperación, de la visión turbia a la falta (a la ceguera), responde una actividad amplia, pero que en el marco de nuestro discurso parece querer condensarse en un pensarniento poético, manera de filosofar que expresa lo que el conocimiento científico no puede explicar, y que habla no del “es” sino de lo posible, de la experiencia abierta, lejana e inquietante del símbolo.

“Creí comprender que entre el mundo externo y el mundo interno existía un vínculo ... “

Now, Romero de Solís is, as it happens, talking of the nature of the analytic imagination (p. 227) and of the value of the poetic symbol, but, though he specifically converts this into a life-enhancing principle, or, indeed, category, opposed to the “dead” concept and what he calls the “faculty” of nostalgia –thus tending to deny, perhaps, the, temporal nature of these ideas– it is at least possible, and one might feel actually desirable, to see that “lo posible y lo soñado”, the “vacuum” of existence and the tragic conception of poetry have unavoidably to do with time, and that the link between the external and the internal glimpsed by Nerval is no other than the poetic imagination, the “dream” of love, for example, which is one of those moments “both in and out of time” which Eliot is so concerned with in Four Quartets, and which, we are suggesting, form the basis of the artistic vision which Cernuda follows Yeats in seeing as paramount.

What imagination “ reconstructs” is not the facts of an event or an experience, but an intuition of their value, and this is not something which reason must necessarily bring into harmony with an analysis of what Romero de Solís is pleased to call “reality”. Indeed, one may well feel that the philosopher, in his admirable analysis of the composition and coherence of the poetic symbol, has entirely omitted any examination of its origin or its function, both of which are, however, implied in his terminology, and present in the quotation from Nerval. These would be, respectively, the idea of isolation consequent upon his experience of beauty subject to time, and the construction of an image which, while revealing the agony of this origin, will nevertheless also point to the durability of the experience itself.

It is hardly surprising that this sense of Nerval's idea should be present in Los hijos del limo[42], an essay on Romantic and modern poetry by one of Cernuda's Is best critics, Octavio Paz, for it is quite possible that he had Cernuda in mind when looking for the title and dedication to his book. The motto, from which the title derives, is from Nerval:

In “Quetzalcoatl” this idea appears in the question, “¿Quién le dio al fango un alma?”, the word immediately preceding being “soledad”[43]. This cannot be pure coincidence: the “trágico ocio del poeta”, is precisely the consequence of his gift of imagination, and implies both solitude –which is not necessarily “ontological” , as Silver holds[44]– and an ironic consciousness of the disparity between the common notion of time and the “eternity”, however brief, of aesthetic experience. Paz goes further, and holds that the equation “ aesthetic =erotic” is crucial to this poetry:

Como sus predecesores románticos y simbolistas, los poetas del Siglo XX han opuesto al tiempo lineal del progreso y de la historia, el tiempo instantáneo del erotismo, el tiempo cíclico de la analogía o el tiempo hueco de la conciencia irónica.[45]

This identification of the experiences of love and poetry is one which Cernuda specifically makes[46], and as we have seen, it underlies the mature Yeats's concept of poetry. Paz, in a different essay, makes the further point that the common origin of “natural” or colloquial language in English and Spanish poetry is not Wordsworth, but Jules Laforgue, “el maestro de Eliot y Pound.”[47] It might also be added that, in Pound's case, at least, it was Yeats who told him to look to Paris for guidance on how to make it new; and, since Paz has already mentioned Pound, rather than Browning or Eliot, as Cernuda's model in certain of his later poems[48], the trail seems once again to lead back to Yeats in our investigation into the sources of the development of Cernuda's middle style and the central position now occupied by the coalescence of the aesthetic and erotic visions.

This view is not taken by Derek Harris, who argues on similar grounds for an essentially thematic and psychological approach to Cernuda's poetry. Citing Paz's distinction between the “amor activo” of the early poems, and the “amor contemplativo” of the later work, he concludes that “this most useful and perceptive distintiction” helps us to understand “Cernuda's attempt to use his past to reach understanding of his present self”[49]. This ultimately leads the critic to see in “El Arbol “a “reversal of the attitude of “Vereda del cuco” where he was able to console himself that his own desire could live on in the desire of the new generation of young people.”[50]

But “the new generation of young people” seems a somewhat lame, and much too brief, paraphrase of Cernuda's lines:

There are elements here –the image, the fountain, the idea of constant renewal, and especially the notions of redemption and creation– which point to something much more arcane and much more rarefied than the mere mechanical continuity of the species or the appearance upon the scene of fresh specimens of “ Lusty Juventus”. The pride, the beauty and the potency of youth are, of course, part of the meaning, but “rescate de la muerte” definitely points back to the poet's rô1e in the Lorca elegy, and the “life “created cannot be other than the life of the mind, or the creative imagination, which is so obviously meant by these terms elsewhere in Cernuda. Finally, and one would think, conclusively, Paz himself seems to have intended his distinction to be understood in this sense, for he is exalting, not humbling, the mature poet's vision when he writes, immeditately before the phrase picked up by Harris:

La diferencia de tono muestra el sentido de su evolución espiritual: en el segundo texto, cl amor ya no es inmortal, sino eterno, y el “nosotros” se convierte en “lo amado”. El poeta no participa: ve.[52]

Thus, when Harris states, as a general truth of Cernuda's poetry, that “Beauty, and the pursuit of beauty in the artifact, can redeem the wretchedness of human existence”[53], it becomes important to add that such beauty must be conceived, not in abstract, but in direct sensuous terms, as an actual state of mind of the poet or the lover (only Shakespeare's lunatic is missing from the famous trilogy that are of imagination all compact.) and even as an actual state of mind of the poet who is or has been a lover. For it is this latter condition that justifies Harris's quotation, in this regard, of the remark Cernuda makes about Don Quijote, viz:

Aunque dentro de su alma existe acaso la creencia de que las cosas no son como él dice que las ve, no irnporta: conviene embriagar la razón y transformar la mísera realidad de los hombres, que tan divina pudiera ser sólo con añadirle un poco de exaltación.[54]

Cernuda's thought here is assuredly a product of the feeling intellect: it is not so much a “seeing” that Paz's “ve” implies as what Heidegger might have called a oseeingthrough”.

Through a sensuous apprehension of beauty, then, and the concomitant experience of love, the imagination of both poets comes to dwell on the wasting effects of time. What time did to Maud Gonne is well enough known, and Martínez Nadal has gone some way towards providing us with the identity of at least one of the lovers whom Cernuda was later alternatively to exalt and contemn for his beauty, capriciousness and egoism[55]. But the personalities cannot concern us here. What does concern us is how these experiences, in exciting or baulking the desire of the two poets, finally provided them with both a theme and a highly original way of exploiting it. In both this involved an aesthetic vision sub specie aeternitatis.

Yeats's first strong statement of this occurs in the preliminary poem to Responsibilities, “The Grey Rock”, in which “one that was like a woman made. complains, in a conclave of the gods of ancient Ireland, about the faithlessness of a mortal lover:

The mystery as to the identity of the speaker, the winedrenched frivolity of this Hibernian Olympus, and even the ultimate obscurity of the italicised speaker leave the quoted words at the centre of the poem, with a resonance that carries over into the vastly more ambitious “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, written long after. In the latter poem, the question that is asked in Part I affects all the subsequent sections, though it is now divorced from any idea of superstition and is posed, as it were, this side of mortality:

Though the theme of time is vast in Cernuda's work, Yeats's lines readily send the mind back to the first poems of Como quien espera el alba in which Cernuda seems to follow Yeats in the very imagery. Hölderlin is probably the immediate source, but set this beside Yeats:

These are Jupiter's words to Ganymede, and they indicate, in the code we are learning to decipher, both the identification of poet with god, and the divine vision of passion as source and recompense of the artist's solitude. Furthermore, if Yeats is classical in his evocation of the gods of the Irish tradition, what can be said of Cernuda's adoption of Roman mythology? “Para bien y para mal,” writes Octavio Paz, “los españoles sienten cierta dificultad en ser rnodernos.”[59] But Cernuda is not content to leave it at a classical allusion, for his purpose is to examine the notion of the sensuous in time:

The last line points unmistakably to Mallarmé and the Symbolist tradition, which was so important in Yeats's development, and, as we have said, was present in Cernuda's poetry from the very beginning. Though it is true that Cernuda occasionally lapses into an inflated and pompous style, close at times to the dullness of neo-clas-sicism, we do, surely, feel that his use of certain of the symbols of antiquity is more than just the rhetoric of a “clasicismo de yeso”[61]. Paz's further charge that there are “demasiados dioses y jardines” is one of those statements that it is impossible to refute and, at the same time, impossible to assent to. How many gods and gardens would be enough? And is there “too much” blue in Mallarmé, or Picasso?

Concentrating on the content of these symbols, and admitting with Paz that the diction of some of these middle period poems is sluggish, one must see that Cernuda's use of them is not neo-Classical or even properly Romantic. They do not passively stand for a bygone culture, but actively present a modern view of this and all other cultures: they are the steadiest reminders of the conflation in Cernuda's thought of the primacy of art and the desolation of time. Even the gods, whom, in Cernuda's scheme, man conceives, are subject to decomposition, but before they fade from the memory of history they shed the seeds of fire from which new art springs, as the poet, before time obliterates him, “gathers from the air a live tradition”, as Pound put it. And it was Pound, too, who stressed that what the poet sees is, from generation to generation, “now in the mind entire”.

As for the tragic implications of this view, for both Yeats and Cernuda they would seem to be the necessary condition of their peculiar view of art itself. Man, Yeats says, is in love with what vanishes, but only the artist dare contemplate this possibility:

Again and again Yeats returns to the idea that isolation and solitude are inseparable from the poet's condition, and even that the insidious doubt as to the permanence of “master-work of intellect and han” is, paradoxically, his only effective consolation, for

The sense seems to be twofold: that professional success would lead to intolerable invasion of the privacy in which the poet's dreaming knowledge is sought; and that conviction would be still-born, since it would deprive the aesthetic experience of the tensions of emotional cornmitment, of the vertiginous proximity to error, which distinguish image from concept.

But the obvious danger remains: moral or political commitment may be right, after all. The poet is thus “caught/In the cold snows of a dream”[64], haunted by the fear that art itself may be an illusion, as transitory as the reality it seeks to penetrate and immortalise. Anguish, isolation, doubt, perplexity -such is the price the poet pays for his privileged insight, and it is this paradox which makes Cernuda's conception of “el trágico ocio del poeta” more than mere rhetoric.

Cernuda's version of these paradoxes is more melodic, more resigned than Yeats's, though he perhaps shirks, at least in his poetry, facing the final consequences of such thought, namely that poetry itself may be a self-deluding enterprise:

Perhaps, however, he does glance at the deadly notion in the ambiguity of como. in these lines from the same poem:

In any case, the strategy for both poets is the same, for, if there is any reality, it is in the life of the mind, the conscious, brooding artistic mind, that it must be sought. Yeats's magnificent “Meru” sets out this idea in all its bleak beauty:

The rage and desperation are typical of Yeats at such moments, but, despite the quieter tone, Cernuda is getting at much the same thing in “Río vespertino”, one of his finest poems. He once again declares his faith in the superior nature of the poet's vision, accepting that, in the quiet of thought –what Yeats calls a man's own secret meditation”– the poet is condemned to the task

Whether one chooses to see these last lines as an answer to his own doubts –and the word “sueño” is one Cernuda very often uses in connection with art– or to the doubts of others, like Yeats, the very fact that he touches on the issue at all shows how crucial it is to him. Like Yeats, he sees thought, and the tradition of thought, as the centre of civilisation, and the poet's only hope:

Both “Meru” and “Río vespertino” then, deal with man's whole enterprise in striving after knowledge, not of scientific truth, but of the workings of the human heart, the reality of thought. Such knowledge is inevitably unsatisfactory, and is presented by both poets in negative terms: in Cernuda it is blind, a mere shadow, and in Yeats it is a desolation reached through a process of destruction. Hence the rage of the one, the quiet despair of the other: what was to have been the best that can be said or thought is bred in tragic isolation and leads to a vision of emptiness. Since the foundation of the idea of beauty is transience, utter negation becomes a condition of the poetic imagination.

It is suggested that Cernuda developed this idea from Yeats, who had it from Mallarmé. Furthermore, we now have an approach to Cernuda's concept of solitude which is very different from Silver's somewhat perplexing notion of ontological solitude” . It seems simpler to take this solitude as a necessary condition of the poetry, or, if one prefers, a conscious strategy of the poet. Silver holds that solitude is man's common lot, and that the poet tries to fill it with natural beauty or even, curiously, to “merge “ with nature:

“Cernuda”, he tells us wants the best of both worlds: the “Sueño divino” which is eternity, and the vegetable well-being of the natural world.[69]

Apart from the difficulty involved in becoming a poplar tree, such a view fails to take into account Cernuda's insistence on knowlege, understanding, faith and the life of the mind. In “El nombre”, for example, the contemplation of nature causes the poet to turn his eyes inward, and not outward, as Silver suggests:

One is, incidentally, reminded of Eliot's “I said to my soul, 'Be still'” , and certainly the peace and harmony of nature invite introspection as well as inspection. Moreover, Cernuda is not mooning about among the trees, but intent upon the Movement of creative activity, the mind in the process of forming a poem:

Similarly, in the gracious compliment to Jiménez, in “El poeta”, Cernuda identifies this combination of the inward-and-outward-directed gaze, or, perhaps this internalising of universal form, as the source of poetic inspiration:

J. Olivio Jiménez finds in this grouping of desire, rose and all-seeing eye of the poet “Los tres protagonistas de drama metafísico: el hombre, la realidad trascendente y el impulso desde aquél hacia éste”[72], and it is possible, in our terms, to substitute “poetic creation” for “dram”, metafísico”, since the entire “realidad v. deseo”opposition can be understood as an analysis of the creative imagination.

Returning, then, to Silver's analysis, it may be fel that he is overstating the amount of Cernuda's personal stake in the division into subjective world (Loneliness) and objective world (Nature), thus ignoring the important aesthetic concern. Finally, Silver's remark that Cernuda is a “man speaking for Man”[73] a phrase adapted from Wordsworth, to whom Cernuda is implicitly comparedprobably exaggerates the didactic side of Cernuda's work, and in any case runs against the main drift of his argument.

But if there is one Yeatsian theme that Cernuda took up more than another, it is the continuity of sexual desire into old, or relatively old age. In the note to his translation of Byzantium”, he comments on the rage of Yeats:

En el primero de los poemas citados, el tema bizantino se enlaza con cl de la vejez; la vejez, el hecho de envejecer, producía en Yeats un despecho, una rabia que acaso ningún poeta haya expresado antes que él. No se trata de lamentos sentimentales del género de “Juventud, divino tesoro”, sino de un furor impotente que en Yeats encontró expresión acendrada (cosa rara, que pocos hombres, o ninguno, sientan el ultraje que es la vejez).[74]

These remarks are followed by a translation of Yeats's brief poem, oThe Spur” which consists of only two couplets. The fact Cernuda should have seen fit to stress this small thing in connection with his translation of a major poem of Yeats's dealing with the gifts reserved for age” demostrates the extent of his fascination with Yeats's highly personal theme. Though it probably justifies his remark that he was “predisposed. to digest the teachings of certain English poets, one cannot help feeling that some of his most characteristic themes would perhaps never have found expression if it had not been for the example of his models.

In fact, Yeats had been dealing with this theme for many years before he wrote “The Spur”, which is from Last Poems. Cernuda, therefore, must have been struck by the constancy as well as the originality of the idea, and the pedigree it had, acquired by the late thirties, for he could easily have chosen as text better known instances, like these:

The fact that Cernuda quotes from “The Spur” suggests a close and continuous reading of Yeats, and it may be deduced that he found in the prestige of Yeats's example the moral support and legitimation that enabled him to introduce the delicate theme boldly into his own poetry. (The blatancy of the homosexual element in the love theme from Los placeres prohibidos onwards demons trates clearly enough that he lacked neither the courage nor the conviction to deal openly with personal matters in his poetry.)

In fact, in his self-disgust, Cernuda goes much further than Yeats, and there are elements of the “viejo verde” in the stanza of “EI César” which begins “Para el placer soy viejo”, and concludes:

He never learned to laugh at himself, as Yeats partly does in the lines quoted from “The Tower.. In the same poem, Yeats refers to the persistence of desire in old age as A. sort of battered kettle at the heel”, an image which he later partially condensed into the famous “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” in “(The Circus Animals' Desertion”

However, though Cernuda never approaches Yeats's wryness, he seems to follow the Irishman in his absolute honesty and in the acid tone of “insobornabilidad” which characterises such lines as these:

The disarming frankness of the last word recalls Yeats's specific use of the words “lust” and “lecher”, and the contrast between the two senses of “amor” is often present in the poetry of his middle or old age, e.g.:

However, both poets persistently link this theme to that of beauty, since the heart permanently susceptible to love and beauty, even in the dismal form of lust after the youthfully attractive, is when all is said, the heart of an artist. Though the desire be no more than the painful recollecting of old lovers, “vague memories, nothing but memories”, as Yeats sighingly says in “Broken Dreams”, and though the elderly poet, turned moralist, may come to feel that his experience is merely the common one of the withering of love and the fading of the beloved

as Cernuda puts it in “Amando en el tiempo”) neither poet strays far from the notion that his faithfulness to beauty is faithfulness to his art, and that in poetry lies his final vindication, since poetry is knowledge.

It is a statement that stands out both for its rhythmic exactitude and for its fidelity, from an otherwise prosaic piece on the place of Manuel Antolaguirre in Spanish literature. It also recapitulates a long series of poems on the theme of the poet, maintaining the superiority of the poet's vision of reality; this is based on the selflessness stemming from his capacity for love, his concept of beauty and his ability to withstand disillusionment or “apparent failure”:

Yeats's “To a Young Beauty” similarly ranges over the themes of beauty, knowledge, art and immortality, to conclude in the well known lines:

Such deliberate appeal to earlier tradition is also found in Cernuda's evocations of Lorca, Larra, Góngora, Gide, Goethe, Verlaine and Rimbaud, etc., combining, as does this poem of Yeats's, a personal vigilance in the ethical sphere with both a concept of beauty and a sense of the special knowledge available only in poetry. However, there is a danger in this aloof isolation; for the poet “would find himself and not an image”, and failure in this enterprise could leave him helpless, engaged on the pointless struggle of the fly in the marmalade., in Yeats's homely image: because

The gift is thus a source of bitterness, for his special knowledge, being a knowledge of emptiness, brings no release:

Similarly, for Cernuda, art is ultimately the evocation of a shadow, like the love that is its source: mere representation, memory, desire, the bitter conception of a possibly deceptive beauty, a probably illusory knowledge:

……………………………………………………………………..

Though the thematic parallels between the poetry of Yeats and Cernuda could be developed still more thoroughly, perhaps enough has been said to suggest that there is more than coincidence involved. It is time now to turn to an examination of the stylistic continuity apparent in their work. Although this is a more uncertain sort of terrain –as we shall see, it is considerably easier to tread in dealing with certain parallelisms between Cernuda and Eliot– we cannot leave the subject of Yeats without at least glancing at the idea of the onake& style in poetry, and Cernuda's approach to it through Yeats and his contemporaries in English poetry, for this leads directly on to our investigation into the importance of Eliot's work for Cernuda's poetry.

Pound, in a well known passage, described the kind of poetry he wished to see being written:

Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language (…) departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity) (…) no book words no straddled adjectives (as “addled mosses dank”) (...) nothing –nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstances, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.[87]

With some reservations, this would not be a ba d description of the style of Browning, whose influence on Pound, as is well known, was considerable; and, bearing in mind the interplay of mutual influence between Pound and Yeats, Pound and Eliot, and Yeats's own admiration of Browning, we arrive at a particularly close-knit set of common attitudes to style in poetry which Cernuda came to share. (Paz has noted the conjunction of the possible influences of Pound and Browning on Cernuda, though he is thinking principally of their similar use of the dramatic monologue, rather than a common attitude to poetic language[88]).

Cernuda uses the same words as Pound, in writing, in his essay on Yeats, of “esa sencillez e intensidad que constituyeron su aspiración como poeta.”[89] As he argues throughout Historial, this combination of intensity and simplicity was precisely what he felt to have been the reward for his labours in studying English poetry.

Whether Cernuda ever shook off the more sonorous, ponderous and wordy diction of the Spanish tradition may legitimately be questioned, and the beauty of many of the poems of his maturity makes one doubt whether it would have been entirely beneficial if he had. Paz is surely right to speak of “la afectación, cierto amaneramiento del que nunca se desprendió del todo”[90], but perhaps he goes too far in his criticism of the prosiness of Cernuda's poetry at this period. Indeed, his preference for the poetry that goes from Los placeres prohibidos to Invocaciones, and his assertion that it is in the final stage (i.e. Desolación de la quimera) that we find “la mirada más precisa y reflexiva, la voz más real y amarga”[91], probably tells us more about Paz's own poetry than about Cernuda's.

Notwithstanding Paz's intelligent and incisive explanation fot the late arrival of Romanticism in Spain[92] and his firm belief that Cernuda was always most essentially a Romantic[93], the accumulated evidence points in another direction. Cernuda, through his contact with English poetry, whether or not he was (“predispose” to receive the influence, moved from the Hö1derlinesque Romanticism of Invocaciones into a Modernist set of preoccupations[94].

This is not to deny the persistence of a traditional tone in Cernuda, which often awakens echoes of Quevedo and Aldana, among Spanish poets, and Donne and the Metaphysicals generally, among the English. The structure of the magnificent sequence. “Poemas para un cuerpo” is quite probably modelled on Yeats, who came to conceive much of his late poetry in this way; but in spirit, it often goes back to an earlier age. Like Martínez Nadal[95], I am sure I have heard these lines somewhere before:

The tone is certainly Metaphysical in its daring application of Saint Augustine to a deliberately non-spiritual situation: one thinks of Marvell, Donne or Quevedo. Hence, in typical Modernist fashion, Cernuda's final voice is a composite one.

In any case, Cernuda's own reaction to what he thought of as Romantic poetry was ambiguous, or frankly negative. He quotes Yeats's attack on vagueness and “feminine” sentiment in poetry, explaining:

Lo que (Yeats) censura ahí nos es bien conocido por su contrapartida en lengua española: la poesía modernista, con Darío y Jiménez a la cabeza, adolece de eso, de ser una poesía sentimental, introspectiva, femenina ( ... )” “¿Quién que es no es romántico?” preguntaba Darío. Y ya sabemos lo que, para él, era el ser romántico: ser “sentimental, sensible y sensitivo”.[97]

Thematic coincidences of such proportions, and a stylistic debt as important as we have been suggesting, could hardly fail to result, in at least some cases, in strong parallelisms between passages or entire poems, and this does happen with Cernuda and Yeats. Sometimes the similarity is a matter of a single phrase or line: an example is this passage, already quoted, from Cernuda:

A more interesting case in which the whole conception of the poem seems to be involved occurs with Cernuda's lovely “Los espinos” and Yeats's “The Wild Swans at Coole”. Here, as one would expect, the borrowed element finally gives rise to the personal tone which, in the manner we have discussed earlier, progresses to the poetic vision which heals the breach between time and beauty:

inevitably recalls Yeats's meditation on the swans in Coole Park, when, reflecting upon the beauty of the swans and their habitat, and the passing years, he is driven to ponder on the relation between beauty and time:

Of course, Yeats's perspective is different: in his poem it is the swans who will disappear one day, whereas in Cernuda's, the poet contemplates the inevitability of his own death in contrast with the “immortality” of the natural cycle. But this idea is latent in “The Wild Swans”, and besides the conception of the poems is in essence the same, for both start from the contemplation of natural beauty and go on to explore the painful contrast with the evanescence of the individual mind. Once again, the aesthetic faculty is inextricably linked with the idea of time and transitoriness on which, paradoxically, it seems to depend. Yeats dwells on this no less than Cernuda:

Such a vision is thus clearly related to what we have discussed earlier, to Yeats's formulation of the theme:

Another incidental coincidence of detail occurs in the line from “Rio vespertino”:

Both poets are desperately seeking some unchanging centre in a world suddenly given up to violence and chaos (the experience of both men in war and civil war) and both, helplessly adrift on the “ blood-dimmed tide” , bitterly witness the destruction of what had seemed most valuable. In words that recall Quevedo, as J. Olivio Jimé nez has pointed out[100], Cernuda writes:

Faced with the lunacy of fratricidal combat and mob violence, both poets instinctively withdraw into “secret meditation” which if not more comforting, offers at least the semblance of order. This withdrawal leads Yeats to a vision which, however nightmarish, carries for him the certainty of moral conviction, as opposed to the lies and deceptions of political “truth”. In Cernuda's case, though Harris repeatedly accuses him of evasiveness[102], the withdrawal is part of a general strategy of approach to a more genuine knowledge of self and world, one founded not on reason but on “fe (en) lo no creído”, the advantage being superior insight:

He is not, therefore, escaping from unpalatable reality –what is “real” about the passionate intensity of the mob? what truth can lie in “ vehemencia de la masa”?– but rather stepping back to gets a clearer view of the whole picture. Whether or not such an attitude to life and to one's fellows considered in the mass is distasteful is another matter. Evidently the aesthetic stance of Yeats and Cernuda leaves them open to the accusation of elitism –a charge. widely made against the Modernist generation– but here we are concerned not to examine the moral or personal implications of the attitude, but simply to see that it is there. If Yeats and Cernuda are guilty of anything, it is not cowardice but contempt.

There are Yeatsian echoes, too, in “Otras ruinas”, a poem which deals with the same set of themes. The ruins in this case are the bombed-out buildings in London after the Blitz, and Cernuda broods on the “irónico detalle” revealed by the disappearance of the wall of a house:

This seems to echo Yeats's lines in Part VII of “Meditations in Time of Civil War”:

In addition to the verbal parallels and the coincidence of image, one notes in both poems a hardness, almost a harshness, of tone, which seems, however, to be the product of grim realism rather than of indifference. The bleakness is linked to a moral vision: Yeats's senseless tumult” chimes with Cernuda's “sin coherencia de destino”, and with his description of the city bustle in the pre-war empire-building days:

The mythical, abstract images in Meditationso and the sarcastically realistic language of “Otras ruinas” (especially stanzas 3-6) compose a common vision of emptiness, a common sense of the destruction of an order and the chaos of western civilisation. The difference, though, is that Yeats laments the passing of the days of the “cloud-pale unicorns”, whereas Cernuda sees the war and its aftermath as a fitting end to a rotten civilisation built on greed, lust, vanity and the pathetic enslavement to empty formalities:

However, he returns to what we are suggesting was his model in the last stanza, in the image of the enemy bombers as evil birds swooping upon their prey:

We shall return to this passage in the next chapter, with reference to T. S. Eliot. Meantime, the vengeful birds are recognisably close kin to the brazen hawks” of “Meditations”, which have displaced the poets and seers first and the “indifferent multitude” afterwards:

War, and the symbols and emblems of war, have obliterated the last traces of a civilisation which both poets regard ironically; Yeats, though holding on to his belief in the value of the products of that civilisation, presents the contemporary violence and disfigurement as inevitable consequences of a past the violence of which is somewhat ambiguously glanced at in the mythological imagery; and Cernuda, more scornful and more morally motivated, questions not only the value of the civilisation, but even the humanity of the victims of war who, huddled in their cities like rabbits in their warrens or like sheep in a fold, have lost the right to the last shred of dignity man can lay claim to –the right to die in courageous solitude (like Iñaki Sobrino, the Basque child of “Niño muerto”[104].)

The last poem by Cernuda which we shall consider with regard to Yeatsian detail is “Apologia pro vita sua”. The conception of the poem as a dramatic monologue spoken by the poet/moralist on his deathbed is.in the Browning mold. We have already mentioned the continuity between Browning and Yeats, a continuity that involves both style and characterisation. Though we now think of Yeats principally as a great lyric poet, there can be no doubt that his career as a dramatist deeply affected his concept of the lyric. He himself wrote:

Browning said that he could not write a successful play because interested not in character in action but in action in character. I had begun to get rid of everything that is not whether in lyric or dramatic poetry, in some sense character in action; a pause in the midst of action perhaps, but action always its end and theme. (Emphasis added).[105]

Like the speaker of “ The Tower “ or “ All Souls' Night”, Cernuda's protagonist summons to his side spectres from the past, and his dying words are a rumination on personal episodes of love and friendship, and on the meaning of life and art and the relation between them. The mouse in the wainscot in Eliot's Four Quartets and the buried mice in the mansion of Yeats's “Ancestral Houses” (Part I of “Meditations”, the next poem in the Collected Works) are quite possibly brought together in the image of the mouse in Cernuda's figurative house (his heart). But it is to “ The Tower” that we should look for the source of much of the detail of Cernuda's poem.

The first and most obvious parallelism is that of situation: Yeats's poem is also a first person meditation –though not exactly a dramatic monologue– spoken by a poet close to the end of his life. Both speakers typically stress the element of passion in their personalities, reflecting wryly on the fact that lust outlives love. Yeats's lines have been quoted earlier; here are Cernuda's:

Like Yeats's protagonist, Cernuda's experiences in love and beauty a dim intimation of immortality, imaged as a soul which mind and body have to forge like a sword:

This in an idea that Cernuda very possibly developed by telescoping Yeats's “Now shall I make my soul” with the image of the magnificent Samurai sword which acts as an art emblem and a symbol of spiritual achievement in the twin sequence Meditations and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, which follow “The Tower” in the Collected Works.

Both poets use the images of the mirror, the bird and the fading light. It should be said that in all cases, Cernuda's handling of the imagery is more naturalistic and Yeats's more symbolic, but the final direction in both cases is towards aesthetic stasis, by which, as should now be obvious, is meant not that these poems neglect reality, or fail to account for their rejection of common values, but that they assume that the important issue, in the end, is not whether the poet should be banished from the Republic, but whether the Republic holds any further interest for the poet. This may sound extreme, but Cernuda thought he knew what “reality” meant, and that it had precious little to do with what is often called “actuality”, whether of the popular or the Aristotelian variety. Yeats's life-long dispute was with Plato and Plotinus, and among Cernuda's favourite philosophers were Heraclitus, Parmenides and Schopenhauer, i.e. philosophers who subjected their metaphysics to the scrutiny of aesthetic experience or who dealt chiefly, if not exclusively, in metaphor.

Thus, the mirror of art (Yeats's mirror-resembling dream” which in Cernuda is “ciego”. once the reflected image has vanished), the bird of the soul or conscience (pictured in Cernuda as “herido bajo un ala / Que a tierra viene, mas lucha todavía / Con plumas abolidas que no sostiene el aire”) and the light (life, grace, beauty and the source and haven of thought) represent for both something considerably more versatile and profound than their Romantic or Symbolist lineage might suggest. These and other aesthetic emblems carry, for both poets, an ethical weight in addition to their older burden, and they signify the poets' continued refusal to accept the dictates of mere reason, their commitment to vision, imagination, faith. Each had his quota of Romanticism, but Romanticism was already a devalued coinage, and, as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were available to them, there is no reason not to allow them the benefit of this post-Romantic and incipient existentialist insight.

wrote Yeat[107], and it is a phrase, a mode of thought, with a peculiarly modern flavour. It points back towards the unique experience of the individual consciousness, for the difficulty of communication which afflicts the twentieth century mind springs from this awareness, or intuition, that it is what is most essential to, or characteristic of, the self in its “secret meditation” that is least readily expressible. Perhaps, in the end, it was this attempt to give utterance to the most elusive and yet most dynamic centre of our being that Cernuda admired, and to some extent imitated, in Yeats. “And knowledge the shade of a shade. / Yet must thou sail after knowledge,” wrote Pound, setting out in quest of his unique self. So too, Cernuda, whose aesthetic vision finally rests on this uniqueness of the “mirada”:

* N. B. References to Yeats's poetry are to the Collected MacMillan, London and New York, 1978.

[1] We are here referring naturally, to the debts of an expressive or stylistic sort that one writer commonly owes another or others. But it is a curious fact that Cernuda was equally mortified by those of a financial nature, and did everything in his power to pay them quickly and scrupulously, in order, so to speak, to obliterate them as soon as possible. For an amusing account of one such incident in his life, see Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 47-8 and 65, ff.

[2] D. Harris, Perfil del Aire, ed. y estudio de Derek Harris, Támesis Books Lid, London, 1971.

[3] Prosa, pp. 878-97.

[4] Harris, op. cit., pp. 71, ff.

[5] T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talenb, in Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1976, pp. 13-22.

[6] Prosa, p. 893.

[8] M. L. Rosenthal, Sailing into the Unknown, O.U.P., New York, 1978, p. 119.

[9] See, e.g., George Steiner, Language and Silence (Faber, London) and Ernesto Sábato, Uno y el universo (Barral, Barcelona).

[10] Octavio Paz, La palabra edificante, in Luis Cernuda (Serie El Escritor y la crítica), ed. de D. Harris, Taurus, Madrid, 1977, p. 140.

[11] Prosa, 1.11-20.

[12] Ibid., p. 1.062.

[13] Yeats, p. 347.

[15] Prosa, pp. 1.103-9.

[16] Ibid., pp. 1.058-73.

[17] Ibid., 1.060-1.

[18] Yeats, p. 205.

[19] Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 31.

[21] Prosa, p. 1.119-20.

[22] Paz, op. cit., p. 139.

[24] Yeats, p. 259.

[25] See Miriam Allott's summary of the main interpretations in her ed. of Keats's Poems, Longman, 1977, p. 5.

[26] Poesía, p. 329.

[28] Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 120.

[29] Poesía, p. 341.

[30] Poesía, p. 162.

[32] Yeats, p. 222.

[33] Ibid., p. 223-4.

[34] Prosa, p. 1.063. This point is made more forcibly by Rosenthal (op. cit., pp. 116 & 122) when he complains about the non-poetic treatment of Yeats by so many critics.. He specifically alludes to Harold Bloom's handling of the symbolism of A Vision, as it reappears in the poetry, accusing Bloom of dodging the issue by cluttering up his criticism with needless technicalities. See H. Bloom, Yeats, New York, OUP, 1970. Richard Ellmann, in his otherwise valuable Yeats: The Man and the Masks (OUP, 1979: is also occasionally guilty of this irritating spook-hunting.

[35] Yeats, p. 245.

[38] B. Hughes, “Cernuda and the Poetic Imagination: Primeras poesías as Metaphysical Poetry., Anales de Literatura Española, Univ. de Alicante, 1982.

[39] Poesía, p. 325.

[40] Paz, op. cit., at times gives this impression, but a more serious case is P. Salinas, “Luis Cernuda, poeta” , in Literatura española siglo XX, Alianza, Madrid, 1979.

[41] D. Romero de Solís, Poiesis, Madrid, Taurus, 1981, pp. 227-8.

[42] Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo, Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1974.

[43] Poesía, p. 313.

[44] P. Silver, Et in Arcadia Ego: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda, Támesis Books, London, 1965, passim.

[45] Paz, Los hijos del limo, p. 155.

[46] Ocnos,”El acorde”, Prosa, P. 104.

[47] Paz, Hijos del limo, pp. 147-8.

[48] Paz, Taurus, p. 146.

[49] Derek Harris: Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry, Támesis Books, Londos, 1973, pp. 119-20.

[51] Poesía, p. 343.

[52] Paz, Taurus, p. 154.

[53] Harris, Study, p. 101.

[54] Ibid., He quotes from Prosa, p. 965.

[55] Martínez Nadal (op. cit., pp. 231-33) identifies the original of Cernuda's “Arcángel”.

[56] Yeats, p. 118.

[58] Poesía, p. 280.

[59] Paz, Taurus, p. 127.

[60] Poesía, p. 280.

[61] Paz, Taurus, p. 141.

[62] Yeats, p. 234.

[65] Poesía, p. 283.

[66] Yeats, p. 333.

[67] Poesía, p. 336.

[68] Silver, op. cit., p. 151.

[70] Poesía, p. 361.

[72] J. Olivio Jiménez, “Emoción y trascendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Cernuda”. La Caña Gris, Valencia, 6-8, otoño 1962, p. 81.

[73] Silver, op. cit., p. 158.

[74] Prosa, p. 807.

[75] Yeats, p. 52.

[78] Poesía, p. 403.

[79] Poesía, p. 485.

[80] Yeats, pp. 156-7.

[81] See Poesías, p. 921, N., for date.

[86] Poesía, pp. 417-8.

[87] Pound's Letters, nº 60; quoted Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, Faber, London, 1967, p. 286.

[88] Paz, Taurus, p. 146.

[89] Prosa, pp. 1.062-3.

[90] Paz, Taurus, p. 141.

[92] Paz, Los hijos del limo, pp. 121, ff.

[93] Paz, Taurus, p. 144.

[94] Cf. Rosenthal's remark: “Again and again, an essential antithesis emerges in Yeat's poetry between the complexity of his speaker's whole consciousness and Yeats's own desire to strip the language down to the most direct expression possible of a private state of feeling. Romantic poetry began the modern movement toward this kind of antithesis”. (Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 127).

[95] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 359, n. 143.

[96] Poesía, p. 448.

[98] Yeats, p. 148.

[100] J. Olivio Jiménez, “Emoción y transcendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Luis Cernuda“, La Caña Gris, nos. 6-8, Valencia, 1962, p. 61

[101] Poesía, p. 337

[102] Harris, Study, passim.

[103] Poesía, p. 368.

[104] Ibid., pp. 225-6. See Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 26-7, for details of the death of Iñaki Sobrino, which gave rise to the poem.

[105] Yeats, “An Introduction for My Plays” , in Essays and Introductions, London, MacMillan, 1961, p. 530. Emphasis added.