Rafael Alberti

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Rafael Alberti : biography

16 December 1902 – 28 October 1999
What was I to do? How was I to speak or shout or give form to that web of emotions in which I was caught? How could I stand up straight once again and extricate myself from those catastrophic depths into which I had sunk, submerging and burying myself more and more in my own ruins, covering myself in my own rubble, feeling my insides to be torn and splintered? And then there was a kind of angelic revelation – but not from the corporeal, Christian angels found in all those beautiful paintings and religious icons, but angels representing irresistible forces of the spirit who could be moulded to conform to my darkest and most secret mental states. I released them in waves on the world, a blind reincarnation of all the cruelty, desolation, terror and even at times the goodness that existed inside of me but was also encircling me from without.
I had lost a paradise, the Eden of those early years….Alberti p 259

The first section of Sobre los ángeles (1927-8) consists almost entirely of poems on the loss of love and the poet’s consequent feeling of being emptied. The metres are short and contain many irregular lines while still retaining an overall regularity of assonance and rhythm. The central section explores a sense of betrayal by religion. His childhood beliefs were dispelled very early by his fanatical aunts and the Jesuits of the Colegio but he still needs to find something to believe in to dispel his feelings of emptiness and rootlessness. The third and final section sees a radical change of style. The short lines of the previous sections give way to much longer lines that grow into the tangled webs of surreal imagery that he was to use in his next few works – Sermones y moradas, Con los zapatos puestos…., and Yo era un tonto……. The key to understanding this collection is probably the poem "Muerte y juicio" (‘Death and Judgment’).Connell p 198 The child has lost his innocence and belief in a way that was almost predestined before his birth. He recalls one specific incident from his schooldays, when the day-boys played truant and went to the beach to bathe naked and masturbate. They were spotted by a Jesuit teacher and subjected to agonising and humiliating sermons convincing them that they would lose their souls by doing such things.Alberti p 54

Sermones y moradas (1929–31) was neither clearly conceived as a unified work nor ever completed. It consists of poems in free verse, full of complex surrealist imagery that is almost impenetrable. They convey an atmosphere of helplessness and total desolation.

Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos (1929) is Alberti’s homage to the American silent comedians whose films he admired so greatly – Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon etc. MorrisMorris "Darkness" has been able to track down some of the specific scenes that inspired these poems but the poems themselves are still in the dense style that Alberti had adopted.

Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir (‘With My Shoes On I Must Die’) (1930) – a quote from Calderón – is his final work in this style. Written in the aftermath of the exhilaration of being involved in the anti-Primo de Rivera riots,Connell p 20 whilst still impenetrably dense at times, it shows the beginning of the socially aware poetry that would be the next direction he would take.

Poetry of the 30s

In July 1936, there was a gathering to hear García Lorca read La casa de Bernarda Alba. Subsequently, Dámaso Alonso recalled that there was a lively discussion about a certain writer – probably Rafael Alberti – who had become deeply involved in politics. "He’ll never write anything worthwhile now," was Lorca’s comment.Gibson p 442-3 This is probably an unduly sweeping comment to make. Alberti’s political commitment manifested itself in two distinct ways: an unoriginal party-line verse whose only saving grace is the technical skill and fluency that he could bring to bear even on such routine exercises, and a far more personal poetry in which he draws from his memories and experience to attack the forces of reaction in a more direct, less opaque way than in his earlier collections.Connell p 199