Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente Aleixandre was born in Seville in 1898 and spent his childhood in Málaga before his family settled in Madrid. He studied law and business, and for a time taught commercial law, but his reading of Rubén Darío and later of the French Symbolists drew him toward poetry. His health was fragile for much of his life, and a long illness in the mid-1920s confirmed him in a withdrawn, writerly existence. His first book, Ámbito (1928), still shows the influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez and the ideal of ‘pure’ poetry.

Within a few years his work changed completely. Drawing on Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Freud, he wrote the prose poems of Passion of the Earth and the free verse of Swords Like Lips (1932) and Destruction or Love (1935), in which love appears as a natural, overwhelming force that unites the self with earth, sea and animal life. These books placed him among the Generation of ’27, alongside Lorca, Cernuda, Alberti and Guillén. Shadow of Paradise (1944) looks back to a lost Eden of childhood, while later books such as History of the Heart (1954) and In a Vast Dominion (1962) turn from the cosmic toward human solidarity and the passage of time.

After the Civil War, when so many of his peers were dead or in exile, Aleixandre remained in Madrid, and his house became a meeting place for younger poets. He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1949. The Nobel Prize in 1977, awarded two years after Franco’s death, was widely read as a tribute to his whole generation. He died in Madrid in 1984.