Authors

Mary S. Vásquez, Davidson CollegeFollow

Luis Cernuda en el exilio y análisis de dos poemas cernudianos tardíos

Abstract

The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda was viewed by most of his contemporaries in the brilliant generation of poets of 1927 as closed, cold, removed from them and from the explosive issues of that period. Once the tragic Spanish Civil War began in 1936, however, Cernuda was of very few Spanish intellectuals to to fight in the trenches in defense of the Republic. He also worked alongside Lorca and others in the Misiones Pedagógicas, which brought culture to the humble people to whom it belonged. María Teresa León wrote a passionate defense of the solidarity of Cernuda. The poet left Spain in 1938, never to return. Over the next years, he lived and worked in a surprising number of cities and countries, dying in Mexico City in 1963.

The present essay offers a close analysis of two Cernuda poems of his final period: “Peregrino” and the far-less-anthologized “1936.” In “Peregrino,” Cernuda employs the myth of Ulysses, who returned home to welcome, to evoke, by contrast, the stark determination of the poetic speaker to never return to his homeland. In “1936,” the poetic speaker meets, by chance, a former member of the Lincoln Brigade of volunteers who came to Spain in 1936 to join the fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The poetic speaker finds the soldier’s idealism intact and, through the beauty and nobility of this volunteer’s commitment, a rekindling of his own once-abandoned belief that human nature has the capacity for true goodness.

Bio Note

Mary Vásquez is the Joel O. Conarroe Emerita Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College. Her research interests center around Spanish literature of the 20^th- and 21^st centuries, with emphasis upon the literature of the Spanish Civil War and the exile of 1939, as well as U. S. Latine literature, particularly narrative dealing with multiple exiles and the negotiation of identity and belonging. She has taught at Arizona State University, Michigan State University and, for 20 years, at Davidson College. She is founding editor of the academic journal Letras Peninsulares, which she edited for 22 years.

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Recommended Citation

Vásquez, Mary S. (2025) "Luis Cernuda en el exilio y análisis de dos poemas cernudianos tardíos," The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 5.
DOI: 10.20429/cr.2025.150105
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/thecoastalreview/vol15/iss1/5