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.
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.
[2] 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.
He urged him to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud.
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.
[6] 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.
[3] 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.
[7] 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.
[8] On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo.
[10] 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 his published Johns Hopkins lectures he remarked: 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The manuscript, which existed almost entirely in typescript, was made up of 5 distinct groups of texts, 3 found in Gilman Hall at the Johns Hopkins campus and the other 2 amongst the poet's papers in his house in Newland Road, Baltimore.
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"[23] but it is not until this work that he showed any sustained signs of interest in formal metrical structures.
[24] 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.
Although Salinas was never a political poet, in his American exile he saw the development of the machine-civilisation, enslaving its citizens to a world of commerce, figures and senseless advertising slogans – as in "Nocturno de los avisos".
The last poem in the collection, "Cero", is a long lament expressing his horror and sadness that the pinnacle of scientific ingenuity, which should be a progressive force, has been to create something as destructive as the atomic bomb.