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.Salinas Poesías completas Biographical summary 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. In 1914 he became the Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris until 1917, when he received his doctorate. He had married Margarita Bonmatí, a Spanish girl of Algerian descent whom he had met on his summer holidays in Santa Pola, Alicante, in December 1915. She had been born in 1884. They had two children, Soledad (always referred to as Solita) born in 1920 and Jaime born in 1925. His academic life seemed to act as a model for his slightly younger contemporary Jorge Guillén with whom he struck up a friendship in 1920.
In 1918 he was appointed Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Seville and he held the post until 1928, although he spent 1922–23 as lector at the University of Cambridge. One of his students in Seville was Luis Cernuda in the academic year 1919–20, to whom he gave special encouragement. He urged him to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud.Cernuda: OCP Historial de un libro vol 1 p 627 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.Alberti p 234 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. And in 1925, his modernised version of El Poema de Mío Cid was published by Revista de Occidente.
In 1928 he became a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid before becoming director of studies for foreigners at the University of Madrid.Connell p 163 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. This school was set up to accommodate 200 Spanish students (approximately 4 from each of the established universities in Spain) and an international teaching staff.
On 8 March 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre.Gibson p348 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.Gibson p359 On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo.Gibson p432 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.Gibson p442
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). In the summer of that year (and in many subsequent years), he taught in the Spanish faculty of Middlebury College, Vermont and was awarded a doctorate honoris causa. In May 1939, he participated in a PEN International conference in New York, representing the writers of the (Second) Spanish Republic.
He had been dividing his time between the faculties of Wellesley, Middlebury, and Johns Hopkins but in 1940 he took up a permanent post at Johns Hopkins where he remained for the rest of his life, including long spells of travel in South America and a period of 3 years at the University of Puerto Rico. In the summer of 1949 he returned to Europe for the last time to visit Italy and France and to work for UNESCO. At the beginning of 1951 he began to exhibit signs of ill-health, which turned out to be an incurable cancer. He died on 4 December 1951. At his request he was buried in Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in San Juan.
Salinas was the father-in-law of Spanish historian and writer Juan Marichal. Marichal would later publish Salinas' complete works, 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.
Salinas has often been compared with Guillén.Morris 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.Connell p 168 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 axisGuillén intro to Poesías completas p 2 as well as adding an introductory essay. The title can be translated as presages, omens, prophesies and it suggests why this book is interesting. Most of the characteristics of the poet's mature style are captured here: basically simple and colloquial language used to depict everyday things in surprising ways in order to bring out the appearance/reality duality. He tended not to use traditional Spanish verse-forms in his poetry but neither did he write free verse. There is usually some kind of assonance scheme or metrical pattern underpinning the whole. His poems also tend to be short – less than 20 lines long – and playful in tone. One of the longer poems in this collection of untitled poems is 31, which deals with the apparently independent life of the poet's shadow.Connell p 164 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. The title might also suggest a growing self-confidence inside the poet. The appearance/reality conflict is now increasingly illustrated by examples gathered from life in a modern metropolis.
A key poem is "Vocación". Its first stanza is almost a paraphrase of Guillén's view of poetry as a contemplation of something in the world – saying the right words brings reality alive. The central stanza shows that Salinas questions this approach, which seems to give the poet no role beyond that of a mere spectator. In the final stanza, he gives his own conception of poetry, in which he closes his eyes and sees how blurry and incomplete the observed world is until a poet comes along to supply what is lacking to make it something perfect.
In "Navecerrada, abril" and "35 bujías", Salinas uses a riddle technique which becomes a signature device in later collections. The actual subject of the poem is only identified at the end of the poem - a technique that could derive from conceptismo or maybe Mallarmé. In the former poem, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that this is a poem about a pair of lovers. Only in the final line is it made clear that the poet is addressing his poem to a car, which he has stopped for a moment to contemplate the view from a high mountain pass. In the latter, Salinas goes a step further and tries to restore a sense of wonder to an everyday object by translating it to a mythological or legendary world. He develops the conceit of the filament of an electric light as a princess locked in a glass prison, guarded by rays of sunshine. He can only free her at night, by pressing a switch. In "Quietud", he writes a poem about the challenge of the blank sheet of paper – a theme explored by Mallarmé, and by Cernuda as well. However, for Salinas, perfection can be achieved by a poem remaining incomplete.