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Jorge Guillén's Cántico
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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Jorge GuilléN's Cántico has most often been evaluated as a book of “pure poetry,” as the foremost example of the aesthetic purity and the abstract orientation of the Spanish “Generation of the 1920's.” Such a view can easily be defended by appealing to key traits of the work, traits which have been amply pointed out: the careful construction of the book, its stress on the creation of a unique world, its use of essential words with technical precision; as well as the constant search for essential truths, and the avoidance of particulars important only for their own sake. As it has developed, this view of Cántico as “pure poetry” has led some critics to suggest that it represents an epoch of inhuman formalism from which Guillén is to break out later; José María Castellet has Guillén recanting his “purity” under the impact of historical circumstances, and changing to a more human poetry in his later book Clamor. And such a view of Guillén's verse as divided into two conflicting epochs is used by Castellet to support his evaluation of the “Generation of the 1920's” as a group of purists destined to “repent” and change their outlook.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
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1 Jorge Guillén has published four editions of Cántico; in each of the last three, new poems are added throughout the book, clearly indicating that Guillén views it as an organic whole. The editions are: first, one of 75 poems (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1928); second, 125 poems (Madrid: Cruz y Raya, 1936); third, 270 poems (México: Litoral, 1945); fourth, 334 poems, called “completa” (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1950). All quotations in this paper are taken from the fourth edition, hereafter referred to as Cántico; page references are indicated in parentheses after each quotation.
2 See Joaquin Casalduero, Cántico de Jorge Guillén (Madrid: Ed. Victoriano Suárez, 1953), pp. 35–57, 98–99, 201–218; Ricardo Gullón, “La poesía de Jorge Guillén,” in Gullón and Blecua, La poesía de Jorge Guillén (Zaragoza: “Heraldo de Aragón,” 1949), pp. 49–55, 120; and José Manuel Blecua, “En torno a Cántico,” La poesía de Jorge Guillén, pp. 155–172.
3 See Gullón, pp. 31–34, and Casalduero, pp. 75–92.
4 Castellet, Veinte años de poesía española (1939–1959), 3d. ed. (Barcelona: Ed. Seix Barrai, S. A., 1962), p. 92. Luis Cernuda views Cántico in a similar light in Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea (Madrid: Ed. Guadarrama, S.L., 1957), pp. 187–189, 193.
5 Castellet, pp. 43–48, 89–100.
6 See Dámaso Alonso, Poetas españoles contemporáneos (Madrid: Ed. Gredos, 1952), pp. 235–243; Luis Felipe Vivanco, Introducción a la poesía española contemporánea (Madrid: Ed. Guadarrama, S. L., 1957), pp. 88–92, 101; Joaquín González Muela, La realidad y Jorge Guillén (Madrid: Insula, 1962), pp. 81–125; and Casalduero, p. 55.
7 See, e.g., Gullón, pp. 44–46; Blecua, pp. 184–185, 197–198, 239–263; and Alonso, pp. 216–218, 223–235.
8 See Vivanco, pp. 75–81; Concha Zardoya, Poesía española contemporánea (Madrid: Ed. Guadarrama, S. L., 1961), pp. 288–290; and Blecua, p. 197.
9 For such an appraisal see Castellet, p. 92; this assumption may likewise underlie Robert J. Weber's “De Cántico a Clamor,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, xxix (1963), 109–119, and Vivanco's statement that Guillén becomes less intellectual a poet in the course of time (see Vivanco, p. 82). Any view of Cántico as unsuccessfully heterogeneous would negate Guillén's painstaking construction of the work as an organic whole. See n. 1 above, and Blecua, pp. 145–153.
Jorge Guillén's Clamor: tiempo de historia consists of three volumes, all published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Suda-americana: Maremágnum, 1957; … Que van a dar en la mar, 1960; and A la altura de las circunstancias, 1963.
10 See Alonso, pp. 235–243.
11 Thus fitting Carlos Bousoño's view of the nature of a good poem. See Bousoño's Teoria de la expresión poética, 2d. ed. (Madrid: Ed. Gredos, 1956), pp. 19–26.
12 This has been indicated by Blecua, on pp. 287–292, and by González Muela, on. pp. 203–206.
13 For an excellent thematic study of this poem, see Zardoya, p. 298.
14 See Debicki, “Symbols in the Poetry of Dámaso Alonso, 1921–1944,” Hispania, xlvii (1964), 722–732; and Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 72–91.
15 See Wimsatt, “The Concrete Universal,” The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday Press, 1958), pp. 69–83. On pp. 77–78, Wimsatt uses an example from drama and suggests that a character all of whose traits are linked by a governing principle is preferable to a more complicated one whose traits are not so joined.
16 A somewhat similar technique is used with similar effects in “Contemplatión concreta” (Cánlico, p. 308), where collectivized men and personified stones and walls help contrast the speaker's acceptance of the natural order with a modern city's rejection of it.
17 A fact largely unmentioned by critics is the presence of the theme of death in many poems of Cántico; see pp. 37, 65, 81, 82–85, 117, 121, 175, 263–264, 266, 268, 269, 272, 273, 280, 296, 298, 324. The theme of the passage of time is likewise frequent; see pp. 26, 28, 31, 47, 61, 64, 86, 255, 256, 292, 314.
18 See Castellet, pp. 91–92.
19 Guillén uses a similar image in an essay on the poetry of his generation: “The major themes of human existence—love, nature, life, death—filled the lyric and dramatic works of this generation. … Of course these raw materials were presented recreated in creation, transformed into form, incarnated in verbal flesh.” Guillén, Language and Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), p. 210. We are again reminded not to equate artistry with inhuman formalism, denying the greatest value of the poetry of the “Generation of the 1920's”: its ability to give immediacy to basic themes.
20 See Ciplijauskaité, “Clamor a la altura de las circunstancias,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, xxix (1963), 290–293; also A la altura de las circunstancias, Sections ii and iv. which portray the quests of Sancho Panza and Saint Anthony.
21 See Ciplijauskaité, pp. 294, 296–297.
22 Jorge Guillén, interview with Claude Couffon [1959], quoted in Cuadernos, No. 40 (1960), pp. 62–65, and quoted in part, with a vigorous dissent, by Castellet (pp. 91–92). Concha Zardoya has indicated most perceptively the unity of Guillén's work. See Zardoya, p. 296.