Pedro Salinas y Serrano (27 November 1891 – 4 December 1951) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic. In 1937, he delivered the Turnbull lectures at Johns Hopkins University. These were later published under the title Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry.

Biography

He was born in Madrid in the Calle de Toledo, 1891, in a house very close to the San Isidro church/cathedral. Salinas lived his early years in the heart of the city and went to school first in the Colegio Hispano-Francés and then in the Instituto Nacional de Segunda Enseñanza, both close by the church. His father, a cloth-merchant, died in 1899. He began to study law at the Universidad Central in 1908 and in 1910 started to study history concurrently. He graduated successfully in both courses in 1913. During his undergraduate years, he began to write and publish poems in small circulation journals such as Prometeo. He continued to publish poems in magazines such as España and La Pluma. In vacations, he spent time as a lecturer at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he got to know the leading lights of his generation, such as García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. In April 1926, he was present at the gathering in Madrid where the first plans to celebrate the tercentenary of Góngora's death were laid. Salinas was to edit the volume devoted to the sonnets: a project that never came to fruition. While at Cambridge, his translation of the first two volumes and part of the third of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time into Spanish was published. In 1930, he became a professor of Spanish literature at Madrid and doubled up as originator, organiser and secretary-general of the International Summer School of Santander between 1933 and 1936. In August 1933, he was able to host performances at the Magdalena Palace in Santander by the travelling theatre company La Barraca that Lorca led. On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo. and on 12 July he was present at a party in Madrid that took place just before García Lorca departed to Granada for the last time before his murder. It was there that Lorca read his new play La casa de Bernarda Alba for the last time.

On 31 August 1936, shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to the US, to take up the position of the Mary Whiton Calkins professor at Wellesley College, Mass., which he held until 1937. In the spring of 1937, he delivered a series of lectures as the Turnbull Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, on Poet and Reality in Spanish Literature (published 1940). Three Voices of Pedro Salinas, which was released in 1976. His daughter edited his poetry and incorporated an introduction by his old friend Jorge Guillén.

Poetry

Stylistic characteristics

His poetry falls naturally into three periods: the first three books, the love poetry, and the poetry of exile. However, there are more continuities between these phases than such an analysis would suggest. In his published Johns Hopkins lectures he remarked:

::Poetry always operates on reality. The poet places himself before reality like a human being before light, in order to create something else, a shadow. The shadow is the result of the interposition of a body between light and some other substance. The poet adds shadows to the world, bright and luminous shadows like new lights. All poetry operates on one reality for the sake of creating another.

There is a crucial difference between the world of everyday appearance and the deeper reality that the poet sees and tries to convey to his readers. Salinas writes as if he is the first person to see a particular object or feel a certain emotion and he tries to convey to the reader this sense of the wonder hidden behind familiar, banal things. To some extent this is because they were good friends and slightly older than most of the other leading members of their generation, as well as following similar career-paths, but they also seemed to share a similar approach to poetry. Their poems often have a rarefied quality and tend not to deal with "particulars", readily identifiable people and places. Nevertheless, they did differ in many respects as exemplified by the titles they gave to their published lectures on Spanish poetry. At Johns Hopkins, Salinas published a collection called Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, whereas Guillén's Norton lectures were called Language and Poetry. Both devoted single lectures to Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz and the comparisons between them are instructive. Salinas seems to want to show us the poetic reality behind or beyond appearances, to educate us into how to see whereas Guillén gives us an account of the thoughts and sense-impressions going through his own mind: the reader is a viewer of this process not a participant in it. Vicente Aleixandre recalled visiting Salinas and finding him at his desk with his daughter on one knee and his son on the other and stretching out a hand clutching a pen to shake hands with his visitor. Although he was also devoted to his family, Guillén probably worked in a secluded study.

First phase

Presagios

It was at the relatively late age of 32 that Salinas published his first collection in 1923 – both Guillén, at the age of 35, and he were the oldest of the generation to get collections published. It seems that Juan Ramón Jiménez did the main editorial work - Salinas showed him a collection of 50 poems and it was Jiménez who organised them, placing three sonnets to form a central axis as well as adding an introductory essay. Eventually, the fact that he cannot control it makes him commit "fratricide" by retreating indoors, to a shadow-free zone. In such poems, the influence of the Golden Age stylistic tendency conceptismo is apparent and this becomes more marked in future collections.

Seguro azar

This book gathers together poems written between 1924 and 1928. The title is hard to render in English – sure or certain chance – but it seems to allude to the poet's confidence or certainty that he will find random moments of beauty or wonder in everyday life. He grew up in the capital city and is arguably more of an urban person than most of his generation, who tended to come from provincial capitals. His poems rarely feature landscapes and wide, open spaces: this is because such views have largely been catalogued so that anyone with a Baedeker or travel guide can interpret them. What Salinas likes are little unobserved details, which abound in uncatalogued urban scenes.

Fábula y signo

This collection appeared in 1931 and presents the culmination of this phase of Salinas's poetry – it is in effect a continuation and extension of themes and techniques found in Seguro azar. "La otra" is an intriguing poem about a girl who decides to commit suicide but not by poison, shooting or strangulation: instead, she lets her soul die. She continues to be photographed and mentioned in the gossip-columns and nobody notices that she is dead. This shows the development of a more serious tendency in Salinas to go with the playful way he had drawn on conceptismo in earlier works.

In "Lo nunca igual", it is possible to see again the essential difference between Salinas and Guillén. The latter, on waking up, welcomes the return of familiar things. Salinas, on the other hand, on returning to familiar surroundings, welcomes the novelty added by his absence: these are not the things he left behind but new discoveries, despite appearances. Guillén, on the other hand, takes them very seriously but gives no sign that they might have been based in reality, real feelings. He even quotes the view of the critic Leo Spitzer that this is love poetry where the beloved is a phenomenon created by the poet, whilst asserting that this point of view is fundamentally mistaken. However, in 2002, Enric Bou published a set of letters sent by Salinas to Katherine R. Whitmore between the years 1932–47. She taught Spanish at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. In 1932, she spent her summer vacation in Madrid, where she met Salinas and they fell in love. A few weeks later, she returned to Northampton. She returned to spend the academic year 1934–5 in Madrid where they picked up their affair. However, on learning that Salinas's wife had discovered what was happening and had tried to commit suicide, she broke off relations. A sporadic correspondence continued afterwards but she married another man and the affair was over. The very shortness of the affair, two summers and an academic year, perhaps explains why it seems to have gone unsuspected by his close friends. The intensity of his feelings, however, are captured in the letters and, above all, in these collections of poetry. Guillén seems to have been the person who tracked down what had happened.

La voz a ti debida

This book has the sub-title Poema and it is indeed conceived as a single poem whose various episodes do not have individual titles or numbers. It takes its title from the third Eclogue of Garcilaso de la Vega. An ever new "I" eagerly pursues an ever new "you" but there is always something that eludes him. The devices of conceptismo, such as paradox and conceits, are drawn upon again perhaps in more complex ways than before because he is dealing with abstract concepts such as love. The language, however, remains very simple.

In the section "Por qué tienes nombre tú…" the poet shows his frustration at the inadequacy of words to capture the wonder he finds in the things they designate. If his lover did not have a name then he would feel that he was creating her.

In "Tú no las puedes ver…" he uses the riddle technique, holding back the banal word "tears" to the end to emphasise its inability to capture all the thoughts that have gone through his mind on seeing them and kissing them.

Razón de amor

This book takes its title from a poem from the early 13th century and falls into two sections. The first consists of untitled and unnumbered poems like those of La voz a ti debida; the second comprises eight long poems with individual titles. The subject-matter and approach is much the same as in the earlier collection but there is more assurance in the handling of the poetry.

Poetry of exile

El contemplado

Although this was published in 1946, the poems were inspired by the sea at Puerto Rico during his stay in 1943–44. It bears an epigraph from Guillen's 1945 edition of Cántico – again emphasising the strong links between the two men – on the subject of light being the best guide. The book also has a subtitle Tema con variaciones and the most noticeable aspect of these variations is the use of strict Spanish metrical forms such as silvas and romances. In Language and Poetry, Guillén says, "Even a Salinas…composed an occasional sonnet" but it is not until this work that he showed any sustained signs of interest in formal metrical structures. The vocabulary is more florid than in earlier works and there are even occasional uses of hyperbaton. These features are characteristic of the style of Góngora and lead the reader to wonder whether this is not his long-delayed contribution to the Tercentenary celebrations.

The collection shows signs of a new approach to the city and urban life that had been foreshadowed in a few poems such as "La otra" but which was outweighed by his fascination with incidental flashes of beauty and harmony. In "Variación XII" he sets up an opposition between the purity of the sea and the ugliness of the city of commerce. The city is described in terms reminiscent of Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, which is a major change in Salinas's outlook. Marichal's illustration of Salina's poetry is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico.

Notes

References

  • amediavoz.com (Spanish)
  • poesi.as (Spanish, P. Salinas' poem collection)