A Spanish poet whose work has been described as existentialist, mystic pantheist, and neoromantic. Although Aleixandre did not consider himself an orthodox surrealist, his poems feature surrealistic imagery and Freudian subconscious associations. Central motifs in his writing explore erotic love, solitude, time, and death.
Includes poems that are intense, mostly brief, elemental in their imagery (stone, ocean, wind, fire), and they address, in sometimes gnomic terms, the unknowable-mainly the paradoxes of memory: the simultaneous absence and presence of remembered love and the lover no longer living.
"Destruction or Love" is the first complete English translation of Vicente Aleixandre's significant work. It captures the original's syntactic creativity and evocative imagery, marking its importance in twentieth-century European literature. The book is also illustrated.
The life of Vicente Aleixandre Merlo, born in Sevilla in 1898, is marked by his profound connection to poetry, sparked by his friendship with Dámaso Alonso and the influence of Rubén Darío. He published his first collection, "Ámbito," in 1928 and won the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1933 for "La destrucción o el amor." A member of the Real Academia Española, he achieved literary acclaim with works like "Historia del corazón" and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977. His later years were spent in his home, Velintonia, a hub for poets and friends.