texts: occurred at the first meeting of this organization, which was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the late 1830s, Fussell moved approximately 20 miles north of Kennett Square to West Vincent, Pennsylvania, to a farm neighboring his sister Ester Lewis. At that location, he collaborated with Lewis, her daughters, in addition to Garrett and abolitionists John Vickers and Elijah Pennypacker in furthering the work of the Underground Railroad. <mask>'s wife Lydia died in 1840. He married Rebecca Hewes the following year, at which time <mask> and his new wife moved to York, Pennsylvania.At that time, his brother and nephew moved into the Fussell home in West Vincent to continue the work on the Underground Railroad at the Fussell and Lewis homes. Activities of the Underground Railroad increased after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which increased penalties for aiding fugitive slaves. Fussell, in turn, increased his own participation. In 1851, he aided the escape of three participants in the Christiana Riot, providing the escapees with refuge in the Lewis family home in Chester County. Fussell remained an active member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society up until the end of the United States Civil War. As a safe house operator, he is an example of a conductor and of a stationmaster in the Underground Railroad, railroad terminology often being used in this context. Fussell's involvement in the Underground Railroad is documented in an early treatise on the subject, The Underground Railroad Records, by African-American abolitionist William Still, in 1872.<mask>'s home, The Pines, was purchased by Kennett Township in 2016 for historic preservation. Influence on careers for women as

masks: Fussell Fussell Fussell


type: original

texts:
 physicians
Fussell was sensitized to the limited opportunities that women of his time had in the field of medicine because of his sister Ester's stymied efforts to pursue a career in medicine. For this reason, in 1840, Fussell began classes to teach women the basics of medicine. He subsequently began a campaign to advance the cause of women as physicians. In 1846, <mask> organized a meeting of six local physicians and his niece Graceanna Lewis to discuss the desirability of women's careers in medicine. Attendees included the six physicians Ezra Mitchener, <mask> (the husband of Graceanna's sister, Rebecca Lewis), Franklin Taylor, Ellwood Harvey, and Sylvester Birdsall, in addition to Fussell's niece. This meeting eventually led to the founding of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850, although he did not play a direct role in its creation.Later years and death
After the United States Civil War and the prohibition of slavery, <mask> spent much of his time in Pendleton, Indiana, at the home of his son <mask>. However, he died in West Pikeland, Pennsylvania, at the home of his son Dr. <mask>. <mask> is buried alongside his wife Lydia at the Pikeland Friends Burial Ground in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, USA. References

External links and further reading
 The Fussell House
 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society
 Smedley, Robert Clemens. History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania. Office of the Journal, 1883. Print.1794 births
1871 deaths
19th-century Quakers
Abolitionism in the United States
American philanthropists
American Quakers
People from Chester County, Pennsylvania
Quaker abolitionists
Underground

masks:
Fussell
Edwin Fussell
Fussell
Joshua Fussell
Morris Fussell
Fussell


texts:
<mask> (born 1 December 1973) is a British-American musician. He has been a member of numerous hard rock and metal bands including 58, Black Label Society, Crowbar, Kingdom of Sorrow, The Underbellys, SkilletHead, and Saigon Kick. He is the son of <mask> and is currently playing guitar as part of his father's band. Early life
Gibb was born in London, England, and raised in Miami, Florida, United States, the first-born son of <mask> and <mask>. At the age of three, he began playing piano, but when he was about thirteen he decided he would like to play guitar. After attending a Van Halen gig he was inspired to work harder at the instrument. Career

1980s
On 14 October 1988, Gibb and nine other students at The Lear School in Miami performed their first concert.The students performed at lunchtimes and for special events at the school. That same year <mask> and friends formed their own band, which was indecisively christened NNY for No Name Yet. Later they would settle on the name ZEX, and in February of that year they landed a gig at Woody's, a Miami club owned by the Rolling Stones' guitarist Ronnie Wood. Later in the year <mask> would work as a guitar technician on the Bee Gees One For All tour. 1990s
In 1991, after being his father's guitar technician for two years, <mask> enrolled in a music school in Miami where he got his degree. He began writing songs, the first of which was a solo effort, "Whiskey Jam". Other songs penned during this time were "Shadow of Your Dreams" with Emerson Forth and Deniz Kose, "Hole in My Soul" also with Kose, and "Ren and Stevie" with Middle Ear Studio engineer, Scott Glasel and his girlfriend, Amanda

masks:
Stephen Thadeus Crompton Gibb
Barry Gibb
Barry Gibb
Linda Gibb
Gibb
Gibb
Gibb


texts:
 Green.This song was a take off on the Nickelodeon cartoon series Ren and Stimpy. In 1992, <mask> and others including Forth, formed a metal band, SkilletHead, which performed the club circuit in and around Miami. That year <mask> also made occasional appearances as a guitarist backing the Bee Gees. In February 1997, <mask> joined The Underbellys. This five piece band included Billy Velvet (lead vocals), Joel Dasilva (guitarist), Sean 'Evil' Gerovitz (bass), Randy Blitz (drums) and <mask> on guitar. The band played venues including the Viper Room in Los Angeles and Don Hills in Greenwich Village. The Underbelly's, including <mask>, recorded for Columbia Records with Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens as their record producer.This did not result in a recording contract, and the band split up. In November 1997, <mask> performed live with his father and uncles for their 'One Night Only' concert in Las Vegas. He also toured with the Smithereens between 1997 and 98. 2000s
<mask> joined Nikki Sixx, Bucket Baker and Dave Darling in 58. The concept Sixx had in mind when he formed 58 was of a non-touring, internet promoted entity, that would feature on his new record label, Americoma Records. The name of the band stemmed from the year 1958, in which both Sixx and Darling were born. Their sound, as exemplified on the band's one and only album released in early 2000, was a self-described mixture of "glam, hip hop, rock, pop, funk and a car crash".<mask> co-wrote "Who We Are", which featured on Diet for a New America. The same year, <mask> appeared in the music video for Black Label Society's "Counterfeit God" from their 2000 release Stronger than

masks: Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb


texts: Death, as the skulls and chains guy. The band did not have a permanent bassist at the time (for the video Mark Wahlberg was stand-in) <mask> joined Zakk Wylde's Black Label Society as bass player in the spring 2000. Alcohol Fueled Brewtality, Black Label Society's (B.L.S.) live album was recorded in October 2000 and released on 16 January 2001. <mask>'s backing vocals can be heard on tracks like "Stronger Than Death". The Ozzfest 2001: The Second Millennium album included the track "Superterrorizer" recorded at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, Wisconsin on 9 June.Shortly after this, just weeks into the American Ozzfest schedule, <mask> left the band for personal reasons. In early 2004, Kirk Windstein (founder of Crowbar) planned a rebirth for Crowbar and rebuilt the band with <mask> as guitarist, Pat Bruders on bass and Tommy Buckley on drums. Their European tour of 2004 was a success, the highlight of which was their performance at the With Full Force Festival in Leipzig, Germany. This became the core of the 2007 released DVD Crowbar: Live With Full Force Gibb, assisting John-Martin Vogel, produced a mix of live footage, backstage capers and interview pieces. The band has consistently toured Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. The band's 2005 album, Lifesblood for the Downtrodden, was mastered at Middle Ear Studios (owned by <mask>'s father). In 2005, Windstein teamed up with Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed to form a new side venture called Kingdom of Sorrow.The band's self-titled debut album was released on 19 February 2008 by Relapse Records. It debuted at No. 131 on the US Billboard charts and sold 6,000 records in

masks: Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb Gibb


texts:
 its first week of release. The album was recorded at Planet Z with producer Zeuss, known for his work with Shadows Fall and many others. <mask> performed some solos and leads on a few tracks on this album and also went on the initial promotional tour I late February early March 2008. In 2007, <mask> played on his father's single "Drown On the River". <mask> left Crowbar in 2009, citing family and business commitments in Miami.2010s
When his father <mask> put together a show band to take around the world on his first solo tour, called the Mythology Tour, <mask> joined as guitar lead as he had for numerous annual Love & Hope Balls (see below). The first leg of the tour took in Australia and New Zealand in February 2013. <mask> performed as a solo the bluegrass track written by <mask> "On Time", and took second vocals on the Bee Gees hit "I've Gotta Get a Message to You". The second leg went to England and Northern Ireland in September 2013. The track "Fight (No Matter How Long)" was added as Gibb's second solo. The track had been written in 1986 as part of the Bunbury Tails. The third leg was six US dates in May 2014.As part of the promotion, <mask> performed with his father on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, 21 May 2014. In 2015, <mask> toured North America as the guitarist for the band Jasta fronted by Jamey Jasta. <mask> joined the line-up of Saigon Kick at the Broward County, Florida centenary celebrations, the free street festival in Fort Lauderdale on 3 October 2015. Film
The Outkast Talent Agency in Miami were asked to find numerous extras for the Michael Bay film Bad Boys II, released in 2003. <mask> appeared briefly in the

masks:
Gibb
Gibb
Gibb
Barry Gibb
Steve
Gibb
Maurice Gibb
Gibb
Gibb
Gibb
Gibb


texts:
 opening scenes as a klansman. The track "Stormy" performed by 58 was used in The Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde Rock n' Roll Musical in 2003. It was nominated for Best Film Score at Europe's Fennec Awards.In September 2006, <mask>, his father, and brother Ashley wrote "Drown on the River", which is included in the 2007 Burt Reynolds film Deal. The Oliver Schmitz film Shepherds and Butchers (2016) featured the track "Angels" during the closing credits that was co-written by <mask> with his father and brother Ashley

Charity performances
For many years, <mask>'s parents have been international chairpersons of the Love and Hope Committee for the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation based in Miami, Florida. Annually, a black tie gala is held to raise funds for research and frequently <mask> performs. In 2009, 2012 and 2014, <mask> accompanied his father. In 2009, he performed his own composition "Living in the Rain", dedicating this debut performance of the song to his wife Gloria. At the 34th Love and Hope Ball, held at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in 2008, Gibb, his siblings and their partners were inducted as the first Young Society Honourees. References

External links
<mask> website
Crowbar official website
Black Label Society

1973 births
<mask>
Black Label Society members
Crowbar (American band) members
Musicians from London
English rock guitarists
English pop guitarists
English male guitarists
English male singers
English heavy metal guitarists
English people of Irish descent
English people of Manx descent
English people of Scottish descent
English record producers
English songwriters
<mask> of Sorrow members
Living people
Saigon

masks:
Gibb
Gibb
Gibb
Barry Gibb
Gibb
Barry Gibb
Barry Gibb
Steve Kingdom


texts:
<mask> (19141974) was a leading communist, civil rights activist, trade union leader, and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He joined the Irish section of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), founded the Connolly Association to support Irish immigrants in Britain, and served as the editor of Irish Freedom. In 1966 as a leading member of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), Prendergast led a successful campaign to end racial segregation (the colour bar) in employment of London Underground rail stations, allowing black people to become station employees. Early adult life
<mask> was born on 14 January 1914, in the Irish city of Dublin. He began working at the age of 14 as a machine operator in a mineral water factory. In 1932 Prendergast joined the Irish Workers' Group, a precursor organisation to the Communist Party of Ireland, and in 1934 began studying at the Lenin International School in Moscow, before moving to London and joining the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Spanish Civil War
<mask> was an early volunteer for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), arriving in Spain on 12 December 1936 and almost immediately seeing combat in Cordoba near Lopera.<mask> was attached to the XIV International Brigade which had no training, telecommunications, or air and artillery support, and as a consequence suffered high casualties at the hands of fascist forces. The military disaster for the International Brigades was later described by <mask>"My rifle is soon burning hot. ‘Kit’ comes over. I notice his face with lanes of sweat running through the dust. He

masks:
Jim Prendergast
Jim Prendergast
Jim Prendergast
Prendergast
Jim Prendergast


texts:
 hands me a note. It is from Brigade H.Q. telling us that we must hold out at all costs. . . . Somebody calls my name.It is Pat Smith. Blood streams from his head and arm. Tom Jones of Wexford is there. Good man, Tom. Always dresses a man where he falls. A hero. He tells me Goff and Daly are hit.I reach the hill-crest where ‘Kit’ is directing fire. He is using a rifle himself and pausing every while to give instructions. Suddenly, he shouts, his rifle spins out of his hand, and he falls back. . . .  His voice is broken with agony. ‘Do your best boys, hold on!’ Tears glisten in our eyes. . . . ‘Kit’ is taken away. . . . I see Fascist tanks rolling up the road to the right. The Moors are sweeping us front and flanks. We'll never hold out now.I move to a firing-position. Suddenly, I am lifted of [sic] my feet. Something terrific has hit me in the side. I cannot breathe. . . . In the ambulance I meet ‘Kit’. He is in terrible agony, and can talk little. ‘How are the rest?’ is his constant question .. . Next morning they told me our great leader was dead. "Soon afterwards <mask> was elected a Political Delegate for the Irish section of the International Brigades and made an officer after being persuaded by Will Paynter to attend an officer training course  a position he held until he was wounded near Jarama on 12 February 1937. <mask>t wrote extensively in the Daily Worker on the capture Major Frank Ryan, the leader of the Irish anti-fascists in Spain, who was detained for far longer than other international volunteers as a part of Nazi attempts to make contacts with the Irish Republican Army. Creation of the Connolly Association
In 1938 <mask>

masks:
Prendergast
Jim Prendergas
Jim Prendergast


texts:
 became one of the founding members of the Connolly Association (originally founded as the Connolly Club), a charity and republican activist organisation that sought to support the Irish immigrant communities living in Britain and to forward Irish republican and socialist ideas. In January 1939 the Connolly Association published a newspaper titled Irish Freedom (renamed Irish Democrat in 1945), with <mask>t as its editor. While selling copies of Irish Freedom near Marble Arch, Prendergast was arrested by the British police who falsely accused him of obstructing the highway. The case was dismissed after the magistrate suspected that Prendergast was arrested for selling a political newspaper and not for obstructing traffic, and noted that the case should never have been brought to court.While he was detained, agents of the British government had broken into Prendergast's house and searched his belongings. Second World War
During WWII, <mask> joined a group of volunteers consisting entirely of former International Brigade members, engaged in research to develop diving equipment for the British military. This group was headed by the communist scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Later in the war, Prendergast became a rear gunner for the Royal Air Force (RAF). Trade Union and anti-segregation work
After WWII, <mask> became a leading member of London's Irish communities, and began working as a guard for Marylebone railway station. He joined the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and quickly became one of its leading members, first being elected as a branch secretary and then elected to

masks:
Jim Prendergas
Jim Prendergast
Jim Prendergast


texts:
 the NUR executive committee.In 1966 <mask> led a campaign that ended the colour bar (racial segregation) on London railways, ending a 12-year policy that barred black people from being employed in certain higher-paying jobs. One experienced guard known as Asquith Xavier, who was also a trade union member, received a letter telling him that his application for a job at Euston railway station had been rejected due to a ban on "coloured men" being employed as guards and porters. Guards at Euston station were receiving £10-£15 more each week on average than the staff at other London railway stations. Helping both Prendergast and Xavier in their attempt to end the colour bar was the Morning Star, a British communist party newspaper that helped to publicise the plight of black workers and fought to end segregation in Britain.After <mask>t intervened on behalf of the NUR, British Railways not only gave Mr Xavier a job but also ended their policy of barring black people from certain jobs. Death
<mask>t died on 31 May 1974, from injuries he sustained from falling down the stairs in front of his home in St Johns Wood Terrace. His remains were cremated in Golders Green Crematorium and were taken to Mount Jerome where they were placed in the grave of <mask>'s cousin Bill Gannon, who had also been an influential Irish communist. After being buried with his cousin, an individual gravestone was raised to commemorate <mask>t.References

1914 births
1974 deaths
British communists
British socialists
Communist Party of Great Britain members
British civil rights activists
British newspaper publishers (people)
International Brigades personnel
National Union of

masks:
Jim Prendergast
Jim Prendergas
Jim Prendergas
Jim
Jim Prendergas


texts:
<mask>, (born January 7, 1934 in Córdoba, Argentina), is an Argentine novelist, essayist, poet, career diplomat and politician. He is the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of essays, an extensive journalistic work, together with a series of short stories and poems. His narrative fiction has received several distinguished awards. In November 2012 he became a numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters. <mask> carried out uninterrupted diplomatic duties for the Argentine Foreign Service from 1966 until 2004. <mask> is a regular contributor to the liberal-conservative daily La Nación in Buenos Aires, as well as other Argentine dailies (Perfil, La Gaceta de Tucumán) and Spanish papers (ABC, El Mundo and El País). He has also been editor in chief of the Revista Argentina de Estudios Estratégicos (Argentine Journal of Strategic Studies).His journalistic publications include some 400 articles, many of which have been published in his collection of socio-political essays, such as, Argentina, el gran viraje (2000), El eclipse argentino. Childhood and youth

<mask> <mask> was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of  Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba <mask>, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th  century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice

masks:
Abel Parentini Posse
Abel Parentini Posse
Abel Posse
Abel Parentini
Posse
Alicia Posse


texts: president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). <mask> fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo <mask>, and Julio Victor <mask>, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s. The novelist's father, Ernesto Parentini, a porteño of Italian parents, was one of the founders of Artistas Argentinos Asociados and was the producer of the legendary feature film La guerra gaucha (1942), based on the text by the poet Leopoldo Lugones.The young <mask> grew up in the Argentine capital near Rivadavia street, and given his father's profession was exposed to the artistic and cultural milieu this most sophisticated of the South American capitals had to offer. The “Queen of the River Plate”, as Buenos Aires came to be known, fascinated the young man, (4) and his memories are evoked in his novel Los demonios ocultos (1987). He was able to mingle with the glamorous stars of Argentine show business, like Chas de Cruz, Pierina Dealessi, Ulises Petit de Murat, Muñoz Azpiri, the writer of radioplays which were performed by Eva Duarte (de Perón), as well as the tango composers Aníbal Troilo and Homero Manzi. Such were the family connections to show business that one of his aunts, Esmeralda Leiva de Heredia, better known as “La Jardín”, was an actress friend of Eva Duarte. (5) Growing up in this environment enabled him to obtain an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the tango repertoire and its culture, (6) which imbues

masks:
Posse
Posse
Posse
Abel Posse


texts:
 his novel La reina del Plata (1988). The imagination of the young Posse was awakened and nurtured by the father's personal library. (7) When he was eight he wrote and illustrated little books he would sell to his grandmother, who lived in the same apartment complex.(8) He undertook his primary education at the Colegio La Salle (9) and his secondary education between 1946 and 1952 at the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. (10) During these formative years in his intellectual development he began close friendships with people who would usher him into Buenos Aires literary circles, such as Rogelio Bazán, the translator of Georg Trakl. <mask> would later dedicate a poetic tribute to the German bard. Amongst his teachers, the orientalist philosopher Vicente Fatone stands out as an  influential figure,  awakening in <mask> an interest in esoteric philosophy which is evident in several of his novels, especially in Los demonios ocultos  and  El viajero de Agartha. In 1943, at age 13, <mask> launched himself into his first literary project (never completed), a novel set in imperial Rome. (11)

The fiesta of the “Queen of the River Plate”
<mask> studied at the Law Faculty in Buenos Aires until 1958. Apart from his studies “lectured by fascist-Peronist professors” (12) who bored him, he lived the “night life” fiesta of Buenos Aires, a city which in those days was home to the most important publishing houses in the Spanish speaking world and also to exiled writers and intellectuals of the Spanish Civil War.According to <mask>, his night time meetings and conversations in Buenos Aires

masks: Posse Posse Posse Posse Posse


texts:
 cafés allowed him to deepen his knowledge of Russian and French literature, German philosophy and oriental spiritualism. In this rich bohemian environment he met Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Ricardo Molinari, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ramón Gomez de la Serna and Rafael Alberti (13). He became close friends with the poets Conrado Nalé Roxlo and Carlos Mastronardi, as well as Borges, who opened the doors for him of the SADE and who would later help him to publish his first short stories and poems in the daily El Mundo. In those years <mask> became attracted to Peronist ideas. Although he had been born into an anti-Peronist family, the huge public demonstration of 17 October 1945 had left a lasting impression (14), as had the strength of Evita and her ability to bring life into the movement, together with the open public grieving aroused by her funeral in 1952. These years of university life and above all of the night life in Buenos Aires are depicted by <mask> as a true “golden age” which he recreates in certain passages of La reina del Plata (1988) and La pasión segun Eva (1994), a fictional biography which conveys the last days of Eva Perón. After having undertaken his military service in 1955, during the anti-Peronist Revolución Libertadora, <mask> completed his university studies in 1958.That same year, he wrote a screenplay, “La cumparsa” (The troupe), which was given an award by the National Institute of Cinematography; set in Patagonia, the troupe is composed of a group of sheep shearers who turn out to be a veritable court of miracles. (15)

Voyage to

masks: Posse Posse Posse


texts:
 Europe
After graduating, <mask> decided to travel to Europe. Thanks to a university scholarship, he undertook doctoral studies in Political Sciences at La Sorbonne in Paris. A few months prior to his travels, he published his first poem, “Invocación al fantasma de mi infancia muerta”, in the literary supplement of El Mundo (16). While in Europe, he crossed the Alps on motorbike in order to visit his sister in Italy. In this period he deepened his knowledge of the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke and Trakl (17). During his stay in Paris he listened to Sartre, he had as professors eminent French political scientists of the time (Duverger, Hauriou, Rivarol) and also met Pablo Neruda (18).During his stay in the “City of Light” he fell in love with a German student, Wienke Sabine Langenheim, his future wife, who would play an important role in his literary formation, guiding  his readings of German literature and philosophy which infuse his works. In 1961 he spent two semesters in Tübingen, Germany, the home of Hölderlin. That same year, his poem, “En la tumba de Georg Trakl”, the first ever text signed as <mask>sse, was awarded the Rene Bastianini prize of the SADE in Buenos Aires. During his stay in Tübingen he read Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Heidegger (19). It was also here that he began writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, which he would finish in 1967. From Buenos Aires to the Foreign Service
Posse returned to Buenos Aires in 1962. After a competitive selection process, he taught as an assistant in constitutional law under professor Carlos Fayt at the University of Buenos Aires.With little

masks:
Posse
Abel Po


texts:
 enthusiasm he also began to work as a lawyer. Sabine travelled to Argentina and a while later they were married. In 1965 he was admitted to the Argentine Foreign Service after a public selection process (20).Until 2004 he would live most of his life abroad, as such most of his works were written outside of Argentina, although he has always defended his Argentine identity, his literary production has been well served by Ricardo Güiraldes’ adage, “distance reveals” (21). Moscow (1966–1969)
<mask>'s only son, Ivan, was born in Moscow in January 1967. At this time in the Russian capital he also finished writing his first novel, Los bogavantes, set in Paris and Seville, centered on a trio of characters, two of whom are students and one a Foreign Service employee, embodying the ideological tensions of the early 1960s. This neo-realist novel played an important part in his literary career. Under the pseudonym of Arnaut Daniel, <mask> submitted it to the 1968 Planeta Prize.It featured amongst the four finalists, and although it had been virtually declared the winner by the judges José Manuel de Lara and Baltasar Porcel, under Francoist pressure the judges had to overturn their decision, due to some charged erotic scenes, but above all because of its critical and ironical references to the regime's military. Once it had been published in 1970 by  Editorial Brújula in Argentina, thanks to the support of Ernesto Sabato and Posse's father, and after it received the Sash of Honour of the SADE, Los bogavantes was later published in Barcelona in 1975 where it was the object of Francoist censorship.

masks:
Abel Posse
Posse


texts:
 All 5000 copies were purged of two pages which ridiculed the masculinity of army officers. This singular publishing episode (22) brought him under the attention of those who were the leading literary publishers of the time, Carlos Barral and Carmen Balcells; the latter would become his literary agent. Lima (1969–1971)
<mask> was posted to Peru in 1969 and appointed cultural secretary of the embassy in Lima. For him Peru represented the discovery of Inca culture, the “revelation of the Americas” (23) which compelled him to identify himself with his creole roots of North-Western Argentina (24). A visit to Machu Picchu inspired a long poem of 240 verses, Celebración de Machu Picchu, which he wrote in Cuzco in 1970 and published much later in Venice in 1977.Also in 1970 he wrote his most ambitious poetical piece, Celebración del desamparo, which was amongst the finalists of the Maldoror Poetry Prize although Posse decided against publishing it. In those years he read José María Arguedas and the great Cuban stylists: Alejo Carpentier, Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. He also researched the life of Argentina's national independence hero, General José de San Martín, and in 1971 was admitted to the Instituto Sanmartiniano de Lima. In Peru he also wrote his second novel, La boca del tigre (1971), inspired by his personal experiences in the Soviet Union. This novel, clearly influenced by Ernesto Sabato's neo-realist style of fiction, helped the author to articulate his distrust of the overbearing ideologies of the time, in order to criticize the exercise of power in the contemporary world and to


texts:
 reflect on the place of the individual in that historical juncture. This thematic concern foreshadowed the ideas about history in his later novel Daimon. La boca del tigre, which received the third National Prize of Argentine Literature, hints at his initial musings on the notion of Amerincaness (americanidad).(25) The influence that the Argentine philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo Günther Kusch would have on <mask>'s fiction and indeed his own worldview after his encounter with him and his readings of La seducción de la babarie (1953) and América profunda (1962). Consequently, Kusch's thought on the fundamental ontological and cultural antagonism between the West's homo faber with the americano “man of being” and the symbiotic relationship of Amerindians with the Cosmos (“the Open”) was to become a leitmotif in <mask>'s work, and particularly in his “Trilogy of the Discovery of America”. Venice (1973–1979)
<mask> was named Consul General for Venice in 1973, where he lived for 6 years. It was here that he wrote Daimon (1978), between October 1973 and August 1977, the novel which began the “Trilogy of the Discovery of America”. This novel has as its protagonist a fictional avatar of the Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (1510–1561). In this text, the conqueror, known for his cruelty which is depicted by chroniclers as the archetypal madman and traitor, raises from his ashes eleven years after his death together with the ghosts of his Marañones. Thus begins the “Jornada de América”, through four centuries of painful Latin American history, on which he casts a disillusioned gaze, by


texts: seeing it as an “Eternal-Return-of-the-Same”; that is the eternal annihilation of man's liberty against which Lope de Aguirre's rebelliousness is powerless to arrest.This fruitless trans-historical rebellion drives him to an ambiguous death in the mid-1970s in Latin America, a condition which bears a resemblance to the death of Ernesto Che Guevara's revolutionary venture in Bolivia. Several scenes of torture suffered by the protagonist clearly resemble the atrocities committed by the Argentine military during the country's last military dictatorship. (26) This novel constitutes a milestone in <mask>'s poetics, as it is enthused with Rabelaisian  elements in a baroque style, by continually resorting to the use of humour and ambiguity, to parody, intertextuality, anachronism, the grotesque, and a continuous paratextual dialogue with the reader, characteristics which would reach their highest intensity in the subsequent novel, The dogs of paradise (1983). Daimon was shortlisted for the prestigious Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1982. The Venetian sojourn was where he received the recognition of his peers; he was visited by friends such as Ernesto Sabato, Carlos Barral, Manuel Scorza, Victor Massuh, Antonio Requeni, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Di Benedetto and Juan Rulfo. (27) He also met in Venice, Alejo Carpentier, who was writing his Concierto barroco (1974), as well as Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani. During his years in Venice, <mask> reflected on the Heideggerian concept of “the Open” (Das Offene) and Kusch's ideas concerning ‘being’.(29) In 1973 he

masks: Posse Posse


texts:
 visited the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (30), and in 1979 together with his wife Sabine  published a Spanish translation of Der feldweg. (31) After a brief trip to Buenos Aires in 1975, and on his return to Venice, he wrote between April and June the same year a dark novel reflecting the murderous political violence being played out in Argentina at the time, titled Momento de morir, but which he did not publish until 1979. Its protagonist, Medardo Rabagliatti, a rather mediocre and irresolute suburban solicitor, is witness to the unfolding armed violence perpetrated by groups of youngsters depicted as fanatics and a sadistic military. Against all odds, the story's denouement sees the vacillating Medardo kill the murderous military leader responsible for the repression, and later oversees the re-establishment of democratic political institutions in the country. The historical reading proposed by the author (various characters are clearly fictional avatars of Mario Firmenich and Hector J. Campora) condemns without a doubt the ERP (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo), the Monotoneros and the military repression, thus underlining the “thesis of two evils”; a thesis the author holds in the prologue he added to the 1997 edition. (32)

Paris (1981–1985)
In 1981 <mask> was appointed director of the Argentine Cultural Centre in Paris. It was there where he wrote The dogs of paradise (1983), second part of his “Trilogy”, with Christopher Columbus as its protagonist, and for which he was awarded the 1987 Rómulo Gallegos Prize.This novel, translated into many languages, confirmed <mask>,


texts:
 according to many literary scholars, as one of the leading exponents of Latin American's “New Historical Novel”. As in Daimon, the novel questions the validity of the official historiography of the conquest of the Americas, undermines the laws governing space and time, and anachronism is systematic, as is intertextuality, the pastiche, parody, while the work harbours, like Daimon, a profound reflection on the Latin American condition and its identity. The dogs of paradise explores the motivations of the Catholic Monarchs and Columbus, as well as the aftermath of the clash of cultures triggers by the arrival of the Spaniards through the dialogical testimony of  the defeated. Between 1982 and 1985 Posse edited a bilingual collection (Spanish and French) of 15 Argentine poets titled Nadir, which included: Leopoldo Lugones, Enrique Molina, Héctor Antonio Murena, Juan L. Ortiza, Ricardo Molinari, Conrado Nalé Roxlo, Baldomero Fernandez Moreno, Alejandra Pizarnik, Oliverio Girondo, Manuel J. Castilla, Alberto Girri, Raul G. Aguirre, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Leopoldo Marechal. This project was carried out with the assistance of Argentine and French poets, academics and translators. The volumes were gifted and distributed to French libraries and universities, with the aim of increasing the interest of these works internationally. The project was no doubt inspired by Roger Caillois who, with his collection La Croix du Sud, made a major contribution to the international recognition of Jorge Luis Borges’ work.(34)
In January 1983 at age 15, Ivan, <mask>'s only son


texts:
 committed suicide at the family's apartment in Paris, a tragedy which the author would chronicle many years later in Cuando muere el hijo  (2009), an autobiographical account presented as a “real chronicle”. When The dogs of paradise appeared in bookshops he announced the forthcoming publication of the third sequel of the “Trilogy”, titled Sobre las misiones jesuíticas, to be set in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay. (35)  While its appearance was announced in 1986, with a different title, Los heraldos negros, it is as yet unpublished. (36)
In November 1983, alongside the Paris Autumn Festival, <mask> organised  with Claudio Segovia a tango festival called Tango argentin, where Roberto Goyeneche participated and which was destined, as it were in his own words: “to bring to life the real tango, the primitive tango of the origins” as against the “tango for export” of Astor Piazzola. (37)

 Israel (1985–1988)
After the death of his son, <mask> could no longer live in Paris and he was appointed Plenipotentiary Minister at the Argentine embassy in Tel-Aviv. He returned to writing there, and wrote three novels, quite different to his previous ones. He wrote two novels on Nazism,  Los demonios ocultos (1987) and El viajero de Agartha (1989).Los demonios ocultos was a literary project Posse had begun much earlier in 1971, after having met several Nazis in Buenos Aires during his university days. The protagonist of the novels, cast in a neorealist style, is a young Argentine, Alberto Lorca, who goes in search of his father, Walther Werner, a German scientist specialized in Oriental esoterism, who


texts:
 was sent by the Third Reich on a mission to Central Asia. The plot takes place in two temporal spaces, the Second World War and the Argentina of the last military dictatorship. El viajero de Agartha (1989, Premio Internacional Diana-Novedades,  Mexico) is a true adventure espionage novel. Walter Werner as protagonist narrates the story in a diary recovered by his son, which recounts his mission in Tibet in his search for the mythical city of Agartha. The third novel, La reina del Plata  (1988),  as the title indicates is a homage to the Argentine capital and the period of splendour it once knew. The novel takes place in a futuristic Buenos Aires, whose society is polarized between “Insiders” and “Outsiders”, where the “Outsider” Guillermo Aguirre ruminates on his own identity.The plot is narrated in fragments comprises ninety short chapters, while the action takes place in the typically Buenos Aires atmosphere of cafes and streets inhabited by the tango, the deep musical expression of the port city, where its characters muse about the past and present of the country. Prague (1990–1996)
In 1990 <mask> is promoted to Ambassador by President Carlos S. Menem and is posted to Prague for six years. His stay in the Czech capital is quite productive. Here he composes his literary essay Biblioteca essential which he publishes in 1991, where he proposes the most important 101 works of universal literature and his own cannon of the literature of the River Plate. <mask> also wrote in the Czech capital El largo atardecer del caminante, the novel which closes the “Trilogy of the Discovery of


texts:
 America”, and which was crowned with the Premio Internacional Extremadura-America V Centenario 1992, where 180 novels had entered. In this work, the baroque style of Daimon and The dogs of paradise give way to a more sombre and reflective style. The protagonist in this work is the conqueror Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490–1558), who lives the last years of his life in a humble abode in Seville, where he reminisces about his ‘true’ American adventure  through an autobiographical and sincere retelling of his exploits by filling in the blanks and the silences left by his chronicles titled Castaways and Commentaries.Posse's Cabeza de Vaca assumes his americanidad, his hybrid identity, by announcing his maxim, “only faith can cure, only kindness heals” as a way the conquest should have taken place. This introspective and autobiographical style is continued in his next work, La pasión según Eva (1994). This is a biographical novel (fictionalised biography) with a polyphonic text which sees an ailing Eva Perón living her last nine months of her life while casting a retrospective gaze over her life. At the same time, <mask> collects and recovers the testimony of people who knew her, illustrating and readjusting Eva's own account. Although the text has a clear empathy with its subject, the novel's stated aim is to provide a deeper understanding of this powerful woman than given by previous biographies, taking her life out of the ideological straitjacket and transforming it into a destined life. Lima (1998–2000)
During his posting as ambassador to Lima, Peru, <mask> wrote another biographical


texts:
 novel, Los cuadernos de Praga (1998), which also has as its protagonist another memorable 20th century Argentine, Ernesto ‘Che” Guevara Lynch. As with several of his earlier novels, the author was inspired by personal experience; <mask> was informed during his stay in Prague that Che Guevara lived undercover in the city for almost a year after his defeat in the Congo.Like in La pasión según Eva, the motive of the personal diary is the trigger for the autobiographical account, an account which converses with the research the author has carried out. Similarly to the previous novel, the objective of the author is not to simply recount the life of the historical person, but based on “solid foundations”, rescue his destiny in order to give account of his life beyond the ideological. (38)
On his return to Latin America after his European postings <mask> increased his journalistic opinion pieces in El Excelsior (Mexico), El Nacional  (Caracas), ABC  and El Mundo (Madrid), Linea and La Nación (Buenos Aires). <mask> arrived in Peru when there was still a tense relationship with Ecuador over the war of El Condor, and in the aftermath of the kidnapping of hostages at the Japanese embassy by the MRTA (1997). <mask> spoke highly of the Alberto Fujimori's war against the MRTA at the same time he expressed his opposition to the trials by Baltasar Garzón against Augusto Pinochet and the International Human Rights Court, measures which he attributed to meddling into the internal affairs of Latin American countries. His opinion pieces also underscored the role Argentina could play in the consolidation

masks: Posse Posse Posse Posse


texts:
 of MERCOSUR and highlighted the natural resources of the country for the benefit of the next millennium, by appealing to the patriotism of its citizens and calling on them to imitate the example of Julio Argentino Roca, Hipölito Yrigoyen and Juan Domingo Perón. Many of these articles were brought together in the first collection of political essays he published in Argentina, el gran viraje (200).His return to Peru renewed his interest in the national hero, Jose de San Martin, which inspired the short story “Paz en guerra” (2000). Copenhagen (2001–2002)
In 2001 Posse published El inquietante día de la vida, which received the Literary Prize of the Argentine Academy of Letters for the period 1998–2001. The protagonist is Felipe Segundo <mask>, based on a real life ancestor of his who was heir to a vast estate of sugar mills in Tucuman province in the late 19th century. The story begins when he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and decides to abandon his family by travelling to Buenos Aires and then on to Egypt in search of the poet Rimbaud. The novel also fictionalizes historical characters like Domingo F. Sarmiento, Julio A. Roca and Nicolás Avellaneda while celebrating Argentina's development at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Madrid (2002–2004)
After a brief posting at UNESCO in Paris, <mask> was appointed by President Duhalde Argentine ambassador to Spain. This was a hugely important posting, particularly due to the aftermath of the 2001 Argentine financial collapse, as this country was the main destination of Argentine migrants of Spanish descent.At the time


texts:
 <mask> witnessed the deadly terrorist attacks in the Spanish capital on 11 March 2004. Deeply concerned by the crisis facing Argentina, <mask> increased his opinion pieces in La Nación, defending regional integration, national sovereignty, and appealing to national reconstruction by evoking the memory of national figures such as Sarmiento and Evita. In 2003 he published another collection of political articles, El eclipse argentino. De la enfermedad colectiva al renacimiento, a work which attempts to outlay a blueprint for a national project. Once Néstor Kirchner assumed power, several media outlets pronounced <mask> as the preferred candidate as foreign affairs minister, given his diplomatic experience, his age and his key posting in Spain. The journalist and former Montonero militant Miguel Bonasso published an opinion piece and participated in a TV program where he appealed to the president to put aside <mask>'s candidature, whom he accused of  having a benevolent attitude toward the previous military dictatorship for not having abandoned his diplomatic duties, and for his support of the Fujimori regime. (39) The president appointed Rafael Bielsa as foreign affairs minister, while <mask> continued his appointment at the embassy in Madrid until his retirement in 2004 when he returned to Argentina.Buenos Aires (since 2004)
After his retirement, <mask>'s commitment to the anti-Kirchner opposition increased. In very critical and controversial newspaper columns he linked the president and his supporters to extreme left wing militant movements of the 1970s, and he also opposed the restart

masks: Posse Posse Posse Posse Posse Posse


texts: of trials against the military, and the government's policy of collective memory which he labelled as incomplete. He increased his round of conferences on the state of the nation, and he supported the presidential candidacy of Eduardo Duhalde in 2007, when he was also senate candidate for the City of Buenos Aires in Roberto Lavagna's ticket. In 2005 his published En letra grande, a collection of literary essays and reflections on intellectuals close to him and who he considers as influential. He also published in 2006 a series of political essays under the title, La santa locura de los argentinos, which was a best-seller, where he attempts to map the Argentine question by focusing his analysis from colonial times to the last century in order to make a call for a citizen lead national consensus. In October 2009 he published Cuando muere el hijo, a testimonial novel where the narrators A and S experience the suicide of Ivan, and they try to come to terms with their son's decision. Later they undertake a journey of internal and external initiation when they travel from Paris to Tel-Aviv, and make a stop-over in Miletus, the city of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus.Toward the end of 2009 <mask> accepted the appointment of Minister of Education of the City of Buenos Aires offered by Mauricio Macri, which had been left vacant by Mariano Narodowski. <mask> took office a day after having published a controversial article in the daily La Nación, titled “Criminality and cowardice”, where he declared that rock music dumbed down the young, and he judged as ineffective  law and


texts: order measures of the President, while demanding stronger measures against criminals. He also rejected the reopening of trials against members of the military regime, and reiterated his accusations against Kirchner for his ideological proximity to the 1970s militant left-wing movements. (40) His appointment and this opinion piece triggered a wave of protests by unions and students, from the rock-music scene and web based social networks, to sections of the media, such as Página 12, who accused <mask> of having had close ties with previous dictatorship and of asserting that most of his diplomatic career had taken place during the last military junta, which had been first aired by Miguel Bonasso in his 2003 column referred to earlier. In fact, one of the most notorious henchmen of the military who coincidentally was on trial during those days, Benjamin Menendez, paraphrased a few sentences from <mask>'s article which was taken up by the media tarnishing <mask>'s image even further. Given such circumstances, <mask> resigned 11 days into his new posting. In 2011 he published Noche de lobos, based on the written account of a Montonero female leader who had been held captive and tortured at the ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics) and who had fallen in love with her torturer.This work delves into the conflicts between the urban guerrillas and the military, and both are portrayed as the protagonists of murderous acts of savagery. It recounts the acts of torture suffered by this woman in this clandestine detention centre, and how she falls prey to the so-called “Stockholm syndrome”, where tortured


texts:
 and torturer fall in love with each other. This novel also has an autobiographical focus, as it reveals how this female guerrilla fighter while she was a captive at the hands of the military had given her typed account to <mask> of her story in the early 1980s while he was in the Argentine embassy in Paris. (42)
Since his resignation as Minister of Education of Buenos Aires, <mask> continues to live in this city, where he gives conferences, especially on Sarmiento's education legacy, and where he publishes frequently in Perfil and La Nación. He remains critical of the Kirchner policies and concerned about the future of the country. Since November 2012, <mask> is an elected numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters (43), having taken the place of the late Rafael Obligado. In May 2014 he became an elected numbered member of the National Academy of Education taking the numbered chair Bartolome Mitre.List of works

Novels

 Los bogavantes (1970)
 La boca del tigre (1971)
 Daimón (1978) (Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio. Atheneum, Macmillan, New York, 1992)
 Momento de morir (1979)
 Los perros del paraíso (1983); The dogs of Paradise (Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. Atheneum, Macmillan, New York, 1989)
 Los demonios ocultos (1987)
 La reina del Plata (1988)
 El viajero de Agartha (1989)
 El largo atardecer del caminante (1992)
 La pasión según Eva (1994)
 Los cuadernos de Praga (1998)
 El inquietante día de la vida (2001)
 Cuando muere el hijo (2009)
 Noche de lobos (2011)
 Vivir Venecia (2016, forthcoming)

Essays
	Biblioteca essential

masks:
Posse
Abel Posse
Abel Posse


texts:
 (1991)
	Argentina, el gran viraje (2000)
	El eclipse argentino. De la enfermedad colectiva al renacimiento (2003)
	En letra grande (2005)
	La santa locura de los argentinos (2006)
	Sobrevivir Argentina (2014)
	Réquiem para la política. ¿O renacimiento? (2015)

Poetry
	“Invocación al fantasma de mi infancia muerta”, El Mundo, Buenos Aires, 13/03/1959. “En la tumba de Georg Trakl”, Eco, Revista de la cultura de Occidente, Bogotá, n°25, 05/1962, p. 35-37.“Georg Trakl 1887-1914”, La Gaceta, San Miguel de Tucumán, 1/02/1987. Celebración del desamparo, 1970 (inédito). Celebración de Machu Pichu (1977)

Short stories
  “Cuando el águila desaparece”, La Nación, 17/08/1989. “Paz en guerra”, en Relatos por la paz, Amsterdam: Radio Nacional Holanda, 2000, p. 67-75

Translations
 Martín Heidegger, El sendero del campo, traducción de Sabine Langenheim y <mask>, Rosario: Editorial La Ventana, 1979, 58 p.

Bibliography

 Página oficial de <mask>sse: http://www.abelposse.com
 Sáinz de Medrano, Luis (coord. ), <mask>. Semana de author, AECI: Madrid, 1997. <mask>sse en la Audiovdeoteca de Buenos Aires: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015142732/http://www.audiovideotecaba.gov.ar/areas/com_social/audiovideoteca/literatura/posse_bio_es.php
 Aínsa, Fernando, La nueva novela histórica latinoamericana, México: Plural, 1996, p. 82-85.Aracil Varón, Beatriz, <mask>: de la crónica al mito de América, Cuadernos de América sin nombre n.º 9, Universidad de Alicante, 2004. Esposto, Roberto, Peregrinaje a los Orígenes. “Civilización y barbarie” en las novelas de <mask>, New México: Research University Press, 2005.

masks:
Abel Posse
Abel Po
Abel Posse
Abel Po
Abel Posse
Abel Posse


texts:
 Esposto, Roberto, <mask>. Senderos de un caminante solitario. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2013. Filer, Malva, «La visión de América en la Obra de Abel Posse», en Spiller, Roland (Ed.), La novela Argentina de los años 80, Lateinamerika Studien, Erlangen, vol. 29, 1991, p. 99-117. Lojo, María Rosa, «Poéticas del viaje en la Argentina actual», en Kohut, Karl (Ed. ), Literaturas del Río de la Plata hoy. De las utopías al desencanto, Madrid-Frankfurt, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 1996, p. 135-143. Magras, Romain, «L’intellectuel face à la célébration du (bi)centenaire de la Nation argentine. Regards croisés sur les figures de Leopoldo Lugones et <mask>sse», en Regards sur deux siècles d’indépendance: significations du bicentenaire en Amérique Latine, Cahiers ALHIM, n.º 19, Université Paris 8, 2010, p. 205-220. http://alhim.revues.org/index3519.html
 Maturo, Graciela, «Interioridad e Historia en El largo atardecer del caminante de <mask>sse», en América: recomienzo de la Historia.La lectura auroral de la Historia en la novela hispanoamericana, Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2010, p. 87-100. Menton, Seymour, «La denuncia del poder. Los perros del paraíso», en La nueva novela histórica, México: FCE, 1993, p. 102-128. Pons, María Cristina, «El secreto de la historia y el regreso de la novela histórica», en Historia crítica de la literatura Argentina. La narración gana la partida, Buenos Aires, Emecé Editores, 2000, p. 97-116. Pulgarín Cuadrado, Amalia, «La reescritura de la historia: Los perros del paraíso de <mask>sse», en Metaficción historiográfica en la narrativa hispánica posmodernista, Madrid: Fundamentos,

masks:
Abel Posse
Abel Po
Abel Po
Abel Po


texts:
 1995, p. 57-106. Sáinz de Medrano, Luis, «<mask>, la búsqueda de lo absoluto», Anales de literatura hispanoamericana, n.º 21, Editorial Complutense, Madrid, 1992, p. 467-480.Sánchez Zamorano, J.A., Aguirre: la cólera de la historia. Aproximación a la «nueva novela latinoamericana» a través de la narrativa de <mask>, Universidad de Sevilla, 2002. Vega, Ana María, «Daimón, de Abel Posse. Un camino hacia la identidad latinoamericana», Los Andes, Mendoza, 9 de enero de 1990, p. 3-4. Waldegaray, Marta Inés, «La experiencia de la escritura en la novelística de <mask>», en Travaux et Documents, n.º 22, Université Paris 8, 2003, p. 117-132. Waldemer, Thomas, «Tyranny, writing and memory in <mask>’s Daimón», en Cincinnati Romance Review, Cincinnati, OH, 1997, n.º 16, p. 1-7. References

1934 births
Argentine male novelists
Living people
Argentine

masks:
Abel Posse
Abel Posse
Abel Posse
Abel Posse


texts:
<mask> (September 21, 1902 – November 5, 1963) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.Biography

Seville and early life

<mask> was born in the Barrio Santa Cruz, Calle Conde de Tójar 6 (now Acetres), in Seville in 1902, the son of a colonel in the Regiment of Engineers. He had two older sisters. The recollections and impressions of childhood contained in his poems, and the prose poems collected in Ocnos, suggest that he was always a solitary, introverted, and timid child whose unhappiness in the family led to his living vicariously through books and through his strong visual impressions of his native city. His first encounter with poetry came at the age of 9 when he glanced through a copy of Bécquer's Rimas that had been lent to his sisters by their cousins <mask> and Brígida de la Sota. Despite the fact that he later testified that this left no more than a dormant impression upon him, he began to write poetry himself during his studies at the Escolapios School in Seville from 1915 to 1919 around the age of 14. In

masks:
Luis Cernuda Bidón
Cernuda
Luisa


texts: 1914, the family moved into the Engineers' Barracks in the Prado, on the outskirts of Seville. In 1918, they moved to Calle del Aire, where he would later write the poems of Perfil del aire.In 1919 he began to study Law at the University of Seville, where, during his first year, he attended classes in Spanish Language and Literature given by Pedro Salinas. His extreme shyness prevented him from mentioning his literary activities until Salinas' notice was caught by a prose poem published in a student magazine. He gave <mask> encouragement and urged him to read both classical Spanish poetry and modern French literature. It was at Salinas' suggestion that <mask> sent his first collection of poetry, Perfil del aire, to Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados, who had begun, late in 1926, to publish a magazine called Litoral. As was the practice in those days, many such magazines published collections of poetry as supplements. His father died in 1920 and he continued to live at home with his mother and sisters. In 1923 he did military service in the Regiment of Cavalry.In 1924, as he was reaching the end of his undergraduate course, he participated in a series of meetings with a small group of fellow students in Salinas's house. These stimulated his poetic vocation and helped to guide his readings of French literature. He became a Bachelor of Law in September 1925 but was undecided about what to do next. He thought about joining the diplomatic service but decided not to on discovering that it would entail a move to Madrid. In October, Salinas arranged for him to make the acquaintance of Juan Ramón Jiménez in the gardens of the Alcázar of Seville. In January 1926, he made

masks: Cernuda Cernuda


texts:
 his first trip to Madrid, where Salinas was instrumental in arranging introductions to, among others, Ortega y Gasset - who had published some of his poems in his Revista de Occidente in December 1925 - Juan Chabás, Melchor Fernández Almagro, and Enrique Díez-Canedo; At the time his first book was being unfavourably received around April 1927, he was again in Madrid. Although he later described himself at that time as inexperto, aislado en Sevilla, he was in reality already known to a number of the influential Spanish literati of the period.His indecision about a choice of career continued through 1926-27. In December 1927, the Góngora tercentenary celebrations reached a climax with a series of poetry readings and lectures at the Arts Club of Seville by people such as García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, José Bergamín and others. Although he took no direct part in the proceedings, he did get the chance to read some of his poems and he made the acquaintance of Lorca. Madrid and France

His mother died in July 1928 and, at the start of September, Cernuda left Seville. He spent a few days in Málaga with Altolaguirre, Prados and José María Hinojosa before moving to Madrid. Although he had a law degree, he had no intention of making practical use of it. He was starting to realise that poetry was the only thing that really mattered to him.He renewed acquaintance with Salinas and met Vicente Aleixandre. Salinas arranged for him to become the Spanish lector at the University of Toulouse. He took up post in November and stayed there for an academic year. The experience of living on his own in a foreign city led him to a crucial realisation about


texts: himself:  his almost crippling shyness, his unhappiness in a family setting, his sense of isolation from the rest of humanity, had all been symptoms of a latent homosexuality which now manifested itself and which he accepted, in a spirit of defiance. This led to a decisive change in the type of poetry he wrote. He also discovered a love of jazz and films, which seems to have activated an interest in the USA. Between his return from Toulouse in June 1929 to 1936, <mask> lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital.At the start of 1930, he found a job in a bookshop owned by León Sánchez Cuesta. All through this period, he worked with many organisations attempting to create a more liberal and tolerant Spain. For example, between 1932 and 1935, he participated in the Misiones Pedagógicas - a cultural outreach organisation set up by the Spanish Republic. He also contributed articles to radical journals such as Octubre, edited by Alberti and his wife María Teresa León, which demonstrates his political commitment at that time, although there is no evidence that he formally joined the Communist Party. In June 1935, he took lodgings in Calle Viriato, Madrid, above the flat of Altolaguirre and his wife Concha Méndez. In February 1936, he participated with Lorca and Alberti in an homage to the Galician writer Valle-Inclán. Since Perfil del aire, he had only managed to publish one collection - Donde habite el olvido - in 1934, and a few individual poems.This difficulty in getting published gave <mask> the chance to revise and reflect on his work. It also occurred to him in the meantime that he could bring all his poetry


texts:
 together under the title La realidad y el deseo. In April 1936, José Bergamín published the book in his journal Cruz y Raya. Subsequent editions added new poems as separate books under this collective title. On April 21, there was a celebratory dinner, attended by Lorca, Salinas, Pablo Neruda, Altolaguirre, Alberti, Aleixandre and Bergamín himself. Spanish Civil War

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, a friend of his, Concha de Albornoz, arranged for him to join her in Paris as secretary to her father, the ambassador Alvaro de Albornoz. He remained there from July to September 1936, but after that he returned to Madrid along with the ambassador and his family.Alvaro de Albornoz was a founding figure of the Spanish Second Republic and his daughter was a prominent figure in the artistic world of Madrid. For perhaps the only time in his life <mask> felt the desire to be useful to society, which he tried to do by serving on the Republican side. He was hopeful that there was a possibility of righting some of the social injustices that he saw in Spanish society. From October 1936 to April 1937, he participated in radio broadcasts with A. Serrano Plaja in the Sierra de Guadarrama, north of Madrid. In April 1937, he moved to Valencia and began to write poems that would be collected in Las Nubes. He also came into contact with Juan Gil-Albert and the other members of the editorial team behind the periodical Hora de España and began to work with them. In June, the representative of the Ministry of Education made objections to a poem to be published in that journal on the subject of Lorca's murder and he had to remove a stanza that made explicit mention of the subject's


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 homosexuality, which was neither common knowledge at that time nor was it acceptable to the Communist Party, who exerted pressure to censor it.This poem, "A un poeta muerto (F.G.L.)" was later published in Las Nubes with the censored stanza restored. In later life, <mask> reflected that this attempt to be socially committed had been futile: "the flow of events made me see, little by little, how instead of that chance of life for a young Spain, there was only the criminal game being played by a party that many people joined for personal gain." He was motivated by his innate rebelliousness and disgust at Spanish society that had motivated him rather than real political commitment. He played the role of Don Pedro in a performance of Lorca's play Mariana Pineda  during the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia in 1937. At this time, he met Octavio Paz. In October, he returned to Madrid, where he remained until February 1938, working on the periodical El Mono Azul, edited by Alberti and María Teresa León.Exile in Britain

In 1935 at a salon hosted by Carlos Morla Lynch, a diplomat, diarist, amateur musician and closet homosexual working in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, <mask> met an English poet called Stanley Richardson, nine years younger than him, who was making a brief visit to the country. He had already met Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez in London. They enjoyed some kind of intense but short-lived relationship, commemorated in a poem dated 20–22 March 1935 and included in Invocaciones, before Richardson returned home. In February 1938, Richardson arranged for him to give a series of lectures in Oxford and Cambridge. At the time, <mask> thought

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texts: that he would be away from Spain for one or two months, however this was to be the start of an exile that would last for the rest of his life. The lectures never took place. Richardson was well-connected, however, and arranged a party for him, attended by celebrities such as the Duchess of Atholl, Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, the Chinese ambassador, Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay.Even by then, the situation in Spain meant that it was not advisable for <mask> to return and so Richardson suggested that he should join a colony of evacuated Basque children at Eaton Hastings on Faringdon's estate. After a few months in England, penniless and barely able to speak English, he went to Paris with the intention of returning to Spain. But he stayed on in Paris on receiving news of what was happening in his native land. In August 1938, Richardson and <mask> met again in Paris but, to judge from various of <mask>'s letters of the time, the intensity of their relationship had greatly weakened. In September 1938 Richardson secured him a position as Spanish assistant in Cranleigh School. In January 1939 he became the lector at the University of Glasgow. Richardson was to die on 8 March 1941 in an air raid while dancing at the Ritz.<mask> wrote an elegy for him which was included in Como quien espera el alba in 1942. There is a poignant postlude. In August 1944, while walking around Cambridge, <mask> noticed a framed photograph of Richardson hanging in the window of a Red Cross shop. On the back was part of the name of his godmother. <mask> bought it. Neither Glasgow nor Scotland appealed to him, which is perhaps noticeable in the downbeat tone of the poems he wrote there.

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texts: From 1941 onward, he spent his summer vacations in Oxford, where, despite the ravages of the war, there were plenty of well-stocked bookshops.In August 1943, he moved to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was much happier. In Seville he used to attend concerts and music had always been very important to him. The artistic life of Cambridge and London made it easier for him to develop his musical knowledge. Mozart was the composer whose music meant the most to him and he devoted a poem to him in his last collection, Desolación de la Quimera. In 1940, while <mask> was in Glasgow, Bergamín brought out in Mexico a second edition of La realidad y el deseo, this time including section 7, Las nubes. A separate edition of this collection appeared in a pirated edition in Buenos Aires in 1943. He had been afraid that the situation in Spain after the end of the Civil War would create such an unfavourable climate for writers who had gone into exile like him, that his work would be unknown to future generations.The appearance of these two books was a ray of hope for him. In July 1945, he moved to a similar job at the Spanish Institute in London. He regretted leaving Cambridge, despite the range and variety of theatres, concerts and bookshops in the capital. He began to take his holidays in Cornwall because he was tired of the big city and urban life. So, in March 1947, when his old friend Concha de Albornoz, who had been working at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, wrote to offer him a post there, he accepted with alacrity. He managed to secure a passage on a French liner from Southampton to New York, where he arrived on September 10. He was coming from a country that was


texts:
 impoverished, still showing many signs of war damage and subject to rationing so the shops of New York made it seem as if he were arriving in an earthly paradise.He also responded favourably to the people and wealth of Mount Holyoke where, "for the first time in my life, I was going to be paid at a decent and fitting level". US and Mexico

Although he was happy in Mount Holyoke, at the end of the 1947-48 year, a student advised him not to stay there and he himself began to wonder whether it was a beneficial force on his poetry. In the summer of 1949 he paid his first visit to Mexico and was so impressed that Mount Holyoke began to seem irksome. This can be seen in the collection of prose Variaciones sobre tema mexicano, which he wrote in the winter of 1949-50. He began to spend his summers in Mexico and in 1951, during a 6-month sabbatical, he met X (identified by <mask> only as Salvador), the inspiration for "Poemas para un cuerpo", which he started to write at that time. This was probably the happiest period of his life. Scarcely had he met X than his Mexican visa expired and he returned to the US via Cuba.It became impossible for him to continue living in Mount Holyoke: the long winter months, the lack of sun, the snow all served to depress him. On his return from vacation in 1952, he resigned from his post, giving up a worthy position, a decent salary, and life in a friendly and welcoming country that offered him a comfortable and convenient lifestyle. He had always had a restless temperament, a desire to travel to new places. Only love had the power to overcome this need and make him feel at home in a place, to overcome his sense of isolation. In this, there


texts: is perhaps a clue as to one of the reasons that he was attracted to the surrealists - the belief in the overwhelming power of love. In addition, he always had a powerful attraction to beautiful young men. He also had a constant urge to go against the grain of any society in which he found himself.This helped him not to fall into provincial ways during his youth in Seville, whose inhabitants thought they were living at the centre of the world rather than in a provincial capital. It also helped to immunise him against the airs and graces of Madrid or any other place in which he lived. In November 1952, he settled in Mexico  with his old friends Concha Méndez and Altolaguire(although since they had separated in 1944 and later divorced, <mask> probably stayed with Concha). Between 1954 and 1960 he was a lecturer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1958, the third edition of La realidad y el deseo was published in Mexico. For this edition <mask> wrote an essay Historial de un libro which considers his work in order to see not so much how I made my poems but rather, as Goethe said, how they made me. In 1958, Altolaguirre died and <mask> took on the job of editing his poetry.His two sisters died in 1960. In June 1960, he lectured at UCLA and became friendly with Carlos Otero, who was presenting a doctoral thesis on <mask>'s poetry that year. This stay seems to have revitalised <mask> and, on his return to Mexico, he began to write poetry again. The poems he wrote in the autumn and winter of 1960-61 form the nucleus of his final collection, Desolación de la Quimera, which he completed in San Francisco a few months later. From August 1961 to June 1962, he

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 gave courses at San Francisco State College. After a brief return to Mexico, he made his third and final visit to California in September 1962, where he was a visiting professor at UCLA until June 1963. He spent the summer of 1963 in Mexico and, although he had an invitation to lecture at the University of Southern California, he declined it in August, because of the need to undergo a medical in order to extend his visa.He died in Concha Mėndez's house of a heart attack on November 5, 1963. He was buried in the Panteón Jardín, Mexico City. He never married and had no children. Poetry

<mask> was one of the most dedicated poets amongst the members of the Generation of 1927. Salinas, Guillén, Diego and Dámaso Alonso were as well known for their teaching activities and their critical writings as for their poetry. Altolaguirre and Prados are probably remembered more for their printing work than for their literary output. Alberti enjoyed fame for his political activism and Lorca was possibly as gifted in drama and music as he was in poetry.<mask> drifted into university teaching simply as a way of earning a living and never held a prestigious post. Everything in his life was incidental to his work as a poet. His published criticism is valuable for the insights it gives into his development as a poet - he tends to discuss the authors and works that had most influence on his poetry and thinking. The development of his poetry from first to last is dictated by the development of his character and not by literary fashion - although his personal crisis, depicted in Un río, un amor, does coincide with the personal crises experienced by Alberti, Lorca and Aleixandre. The

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Cernuda


texts:
 collective title he chose for his poetry, La realidad y el deseo, refers to the conflict that is its primary theme. He wrote:

Desire led me towards the reality that offered itself to my eyes as if only through possession of it might I be able to achieve certainty about my own life. But since I have only ever achieved a precarious grip on it, there comes the opposite tendency, that of hostility to the ironic attractiveness of reality...And so, in my view, the essence of the problem of poetry is the conflict between reality and desire, between appearance and truth, permitting us to achieve some glimpse of the complete image of the world that we do not know.A significant stage of his development occurred in 1923-24, when he was doing military service. Every afternoon, along with the other recruits, he had to ride round the outskirts of Seville. One afternoon, he had an epiphanic experience as if he were seeing things for the first time. He also felt an uncontrollable need to describe this experience. This led to the writing of a whole series of poems which have not survived. Another crucial phase of his development was his residence in Great Britain between 1938 and 1947. He learned English and read widely in English literature.He seems to have had a sense that he was predestined to read English poetry and that it corrected and completed something that was lacking both in his poetry and in himself. He began to see his work in the classroom as analogous to the writing of poetry - the poet should not simply try to communicate the effect of an experience but to direct the reader to retrace the process by which the poet had come to experience what he is writing about.


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 His attitude to Britain was ambivalent. He learned a lot from the literature and greatly admired certain aspects of the national character, as displayed in wartime, but found it hard to summon up affection for the country and its people. He tried to sum up his ambivalent feelings in the poem "La partida", but he considered that he failed to do justice to the theme. Collections

Primeras poesías (1924–1927)

This was the title that <mask> gave in La realidad y el deseo to the revised version of his first published work Perfil del aire, which had been published by Litoral in April 1927. The collection was dedicated to Salinas, and <mask> sent a copy to him in Madrid, where he was spending the university vacation.<mask> later recalled that this book was greeted by a stream of hostile reviews that tended to concentrate on a perceived lack of novelty and on its indebtedness to Guillén. It also really stung him that Salinas merely sent back a brief acknowledgement of receipt of the book. He dealt with the apparent debt to Guillén in an open letter published in Ínsula in 1948, in which he points out that in 1927 Guillén had yet to publish a collection. During the 1920s, Guillén had published individual poems in various magazines - including 12 in two separate editions of the Revista de Occidente in 1924 and 1925 - but, he argues, this is scarcely sufficient evidence to demonstrate significant influence, given that in December 1925 he himself had had 9 poems published in Revista de Occidente. His conclusion is that both of them shared an interest in pure poetry and were influenced by the works of Mallarmé - in the case of Guillén this influence was transmitted via Valéry.


texts: Villena, writing in 1984, sees these poems as the result of the spread in the 1920s of the ideal of "pure poetry" as espoused by figures such as Valéry, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega y Gasset in his influential essay La deshumanización del arte. The young poets of the era, including Guillén, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Prados, Lorca and <mask>, were all influenced by this blend of classical purity and refined playfulness and Guillén was the ring-leader.It was not so much a case of influence as a common, shared aesthetic. The reviews were not all hostile. José Bergamín, for example, published a favourable review and Guillén himself sent him a letter praising the work and urging him to ignore the reviews. Juan Guerrero Ruiz, the secretary of Juan Ramón Jiménez, also sent him a letter full of praise. Nevertheless, he was never able to forget the criticism that this work had engendered. He was too thin-skinned for that. The revision process removed ten poems and also some of the stylistic elements that might have triggered comparisons to Guillén - such as the use of exclamations and the rhetorical device apostrophe - but in reality the poets are very different in tone.Guillén reaches out joyfully and confidently to reality whereas <mask> is more hesitant - the world might be an exciting place but something holds him back. Like Guillén, <mask> uses strict metrical forms in this collection, such as the décima and the sonnet, and there is also an intellectual quality far removed from the folkloric elements that were being used by poets such as Alberti and Lorca, but the emotional restraint is far removed from the world of Cántico. The change of title suggests a recent


texts:
 desire to strip artifice away from his poetry, presumably this refers to the reference in the title to the street where he had grown up - the Calle del Aire - which had baffled Francisco Ayala, one of the negative reviewers. There are already poems that reject the real world in favour of a love that will lead to oblivion. The poet wants to find a place to hide from the world of reality, fully aware that such a retreat or escape can only be temporary. The overriding mood is one of adolescent melancholy. The debt to Juan Ramón Jiménez is also strong.Egloga, Elegía, Oda (1927–1928)

After the set-back of the critical reception of Perfil del aire, <mask> decided to cultivate precisely those things that had been criticised, especially the lack of novelty. He wrote an eclogue, heavily influenced by his favourite Spanish poet Garcilaso. This was published in the first issue of a magazine called Carmen and was received very favourably by Salvador de Madariaga. This was followed by an elegy and then by an ode. Although he came to recognise that writing these poems had helped his technical fluency, he realised that there was something essential that these formal exercises did not allow him to express. However, he was encouraged to learn that it was possible to write poems of much greater length than was customary at that time, which was an important discovery for him. In Historial de un libro, he states that at this time he was trying to find an objective correlative for what he was experiencing - one of the many indications of the influence of TS Eliot on his work, although this is a rationalisation after the fact because he had yet to read Eliot.This small group of poems


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 can be read as <mask>'s participation in the Góngora tercentenary celebrations - except that he chose to evoke the memories of Garcilaso's eclogues and <mask> León's odes possibly as a way to signal his individuality and his independence from fashion. However, their influence is evident only on the form of these poems - the subject-matter is more obviously influenced by Mallarmé. The languorous mood recalls "L'après-midi d'un Faune". There are hints of the poet's admiration for Greek mythology and also of his interest in male physical beauty which would be developed in later collections. <mask> León was a lasting interest. His essay included in Poesía y literatura shows that <mask> considered him to be a kindred spirit, someone for whom poetry was a refuge or means of escape from the trials and difficulties of everyday life. Someone who was always trying to find a way to gain access to a realm of harmony.Un río, un amor (1929)

<mask> started work on this collection during his period in Toulouse. He visited Paris in the Easter vacation of 1929 and was bowled over by the museums and the book-stalls. He spent his days soaking up the sights. One day, back in Toulouse, he wrote "Remordimiento en traje de noche" and discovered a style that enabled him to express poetic needs that he had not been able to communicate up till then. He had not written any poetry since before his arrival in Toulouse in 1928 but he produced the first 3 poems of the new collection in quick succession. His dissatisfaction with the conventions of fashionable poetry had been freed by contact with surrealism. For <mask>, surrealism was more than a literary phenomenon: it a was the expression of an

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Cernuda
Luis de
Luis de
Cernuda
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Cernuda


texts: attitude against conformity.The poems in this collection break with the concept of pure poetry. He retains the precision and elegance of his language but infuses it with more passion and intensity. He continued work on this collection after his return to Madrid. The influence of the Surrealists is shown by the complexity of the free-flowing imagery, some of it inspired by random discoveries such as the title of a jazz record (as a jazz fan, he used to scour record catalogues and was intrigued by titles such as "I want to be alone in the South"), the name of an American city such as Durango or Daytona, a title card from a silent film, or an image from a talking picture such as White Shadows in the South Seas which he had seen in Paris. The metrical schemes and rhyme patterns of the first two collections are largely abandoned. This was the first collection in which he made use of what he calls free verse. In reality, this amounts to ignoring classical Spanish verse forms and rhyme schemes, such as letrillas - in fact, from this point on Cernuda rarely uses full rhyme or even assonance - even though he often felt a need to write in a lyrical style.A few of the poems in this book are written in alexandrine quatrains and most have some kind of metrical pattern, which makes them unusual in the context of the Surrealist movement. In a poem such as "¿Son todos felices? ", <mask> makes it clear what attracted him to the Surrealists, their protest against society and the pressure to conform. In this poem, honour, patriotism and duty are seen as worthless in comparison to the suffering they inflict on the rebel or non-conformist. Just being alive and living according to the


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 rules is equivalent to being dead. It is noteworthy that this poem contains the first unequivocal expression of homoerotic attraction in his poetry. The collection, like its successor, remained unpublished until 1936, when they were gathered into the first edition of La realidad y el deseo.Los placeres prohibidos (1931)

The poems gathered in this and the previous collection came to Cernuda fully formed. The poems that eventually got published were the same as the first drafts, which was very different from his experience with his first two collections. It is a book of love, rebellion and beauty. The poet's homosexuality is made defiantly manifest in this collection. However, the title of the work suggests that there were other "forbidden pleasures" and he explores various ways of defying the norms of bourgeois behaviour. It is the product of an intensive period of literary production between April and June 1931, when Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed. In "Diré cómo nacisteis", <mask> launches a war cry against a society in decay that represses and imprisons people who transgress the social norms of love.And in the next poem, "Telarañas cuelgan de la razón", he sets up the other major mood of the collection, an elegiac mood of sorrow. The poems in this book draw a distinction between the poet's freedom of imagination and the accepted rules of life that confine and limit his freedom. The predominant tone is one of desolation, recalling the transitory nature of love and the emptiness it leaves in its wake. In "De qué país", <mask> looks at a newborn child and depicts the betrayal of his sense of wonder and innocence by the way the adult


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 world imposes artificial codes of behaviour and a sense of guilt when the code is transgressed. It is a theme that is explored many times in his oeuvre. Donde habite el olvido (1932–1933)

This book resulted from a love affair that ended badly. When the collection was first published, by the Signo publishing house, nobody noticed the significance of a large "S" in the form of a snake on the inside back cover.Derek Harris identified the other man as Serafín Fernández Ferro a young man from a poor family in La Coruña who led a picaresque life and insinuated himself into the artistic circles of Madrid in early 1931, aged 16. Biographical data for him is scanty, fragmented and often confusing. In 1945, he appeared in Malraux's film Espoir: Sierra de Teruel and then emigrated to Mexico, where he died in 1954. <mask> probably met him in April 1931 and fell head over heels in love. This led to the flood of creativity that resulted in Los placeres prohibidos, the majority of which was written between April 13 and 30. The relationship quickly soured. Serafín was both promiscuous and bisexual, which led to jealousy on the part of <mask>, he used to ask his lover for money and was generally manipulative.There were occasional violent rows between them. Some of the atmosphere of their relationship is described in "Aprendiendo olvido", one of the prose poems included in Ocnos. By June 1932, their relationship was finished. In later years, <mask> was embarrassed by the candour with which he wrote about it in Donde habite, attributing this to the slowness of his emotional development, and admitted that this section of his oeuvre was one of the least-satisfying for him. In this


texts: collection, <mask> steps away from surrealism, feeling that what was lying around hidden in the depths of his subconscious had been dredged sufficiently. Instead of what he had come to see as the artifice and triviality of hermetic images deriving from the flow of thoughts through the poet's mind, he turned to the example of the 19thc. poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, who produced tightly controlled poetry on the subject of lost love.Cernuda continued to eschew rhyme and assonance but, like Bécquer's Rimas the stanzas are short and self-contained and their language is restrained. Sometimes, the poems return to the world of the Primeras poesías. The first poem alludes obliquely to Serafín, the archangel who is named explicitly in a later poem "Mi arcángel". The leit-motiv of the angel recurs in "II" and in "XII", among others. In "III", the theme is the emptiness left by the passing of love - just as in "Telarañas cuelgan de la razón" from Los placeres prohibidos - but rendered in a much simpler, more lyrical fashion. "IV" shows how the dreams and aspirations of youth are destroyed when they soar too high - probably a reference to the myth of Icarus. "VII" returns to the enclosed world of the early poems, suggesting that despite all his experiences the poet is still an unfulfilled dreamer."XII" suggests that love alone makes life real. It persists as a universal force even though it might have died in a particular individual. The ideas behind surrealism are still present, although the presentation of them is markedly different. This love affair had a lasting effect on <mask>. He alludes to it in "Apologia pro vita sua" in Como quien espera el alba and also in a short


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 story written in 1937, right in the midst of the Civil War - "Sombras en el salón". Invocaciones (1934–1935)

This collection was originally called Invocaciones a las gracias del mundo but <mask> later shortened it to make it seem less pompous. Tired with the habitual brevity of poems in the tradition of Antonio Machado or Jiménez, he starts to write much longer poems than hitherto.When he started work on these poems, he realised that their subject-matter needed greater length for him to be able to express everything he needed to say about them. He cast off all the remaining traces of "pure" poetry. He also notes, however, that there is a tendency to ramble at the beginning of certain poems in this book as well as a degree of bombast. His principal subject-matter is still essentially himself and his thoughts but he starts to view things in a more objective way: the poetry is more analytical. For example, in "Soliloquio del farero", the poet finds an escape from desperation in an enclosed and solitary world very similar to that of his earliest poems. The poem is addressed to his "friend" - solitude - and he develops the idea that he has been chosen to serve mankind in some way by being separated from them, just like a lighthouse-keeper. Other poems in the collection allude to Greek mythology or a golden age of innocence that has been lost.Early in 1935, <mask> had a relationship with Stanley Richardson and dedicated "Por unos tulipanes amarillos" to him. Las nubes (1937–1940)

This collection was written during the Spanish Civil War and amidst all the disruption and uncertainty in <mask>'s life as he went into exile, drifting from Madrid, to London, to Paris, to


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 Cranleigh and finally to Glasgow. It is a book about war and exile and how both of these connect with Spain. It is his most Spanish collection a nd a pivotal collection in his output. Meditations about his isolation in foreign countries and about Spain, particularly about his growing feeling that nothing in Spain was going to change for the better and that intolerance, ignorance and superstition were winning the struggle, are the major themes. There is a dichotomy in the way he views Spain. On the one hand is Spain the stepmother of whom he is ashamed, stuck in the past, jealous, intolerant, violent and now wrecked by war, as depicted in "Elegía española I".On the other hand is an idealised version of Spain, now destroyed, to which <mask> feels allegiance. It is a mix of a lost Eden of the south (the Spain of his Andalusian background), a tolerant, creative, great and respected nation and of the most positive and creative aspects of Golden Age Spain. This Spain is depicted in "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra", "Elegía española II" and other poems. Exile is a theme that <mask> will keep developing for the rest of his poetic career. Physical exile reminds the poet that he is also a spiritual exile in the world, a cursed figure because every poet belongs to a purer realm of experience, as he had already started to write about in Invocaciones. "Scherzo para un elfo" and "Gaviotas en el parque" are just two of the explorations of this theme

Stylistically, there is an increased concentration on clarity and simplicity of diction and his control over his means of expression is growing. He often uses combinations of 7 and 11 syllable lines, the basic form of the silva, a very


texts: important form for poets of both the Spanish Golden Age and the Generation of 1898.The collections prior to 'Las Nubes' were intimate and abstract. In Invocaciones he adds symbolic elements but now his poetry takes on greater amplitude with the addition of reflections on culture, mythology, history and his biography. He starts to write dramatic monologues and to work towards a more conversational style of poetry, under the influences of Wordsworth and Browning. When he left Madrid in February 1938, he took eight new poems with him. In London, he wrote six more. He wrote "Lázaro" while Chamberlain and Hitler were negotiating over Czechoslovakia, and the poem is written in a mood of melancholy calm, trying to express the disenchanted surprise that a dead man might feel on being brought back to life. <mask> was feeling a growing sense of detachment and this is one of the first examples of his characteristic use of a Doppelgänger to express, in this case, his sense of alienation and lifelessness.During his stay with the colony of evacuated Basque children at Eaton Hastings, he befriended a boy called Iñaki who had quickly mastered English and showed such promise that Lord Faringdon was prepared to finance his education at a private school - an offer refused by the boy on political grounds, according to the story told by <mask> to his fellow émigré Rafael Martínez Nadal. Shortly afterwards, the boy fell ill and was taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary. On March 27, he was close to death. He refused the last sacraments and turned away from the crucifix held out by a priest. He wanted to see <mask>, however, and asked him to read a poem. He then turned to the wall and died.


texts:
 This was the inspiration for the poem "Niño muerto", written in May 1938.A key poem in the collection is "A Larra, con unas violetas (1837-1937)", in which he identifies himself with Mariano José de Larra, the brilliant, satirical journalist of 19thc. Madrid. Larra was a fierce critic of the governments of his day and of the state of Spanish society but was at heart very patriotic. <mask> sees in Larra a kindred spirit, embittered, misunderstood, isolated and unsuccessful in love. Como quien espera el alba (1941–1944)

This work was begun during his 1941 vacation in Oxford, continued in Glasgow and completed at Cambridge in 1944. The autumn, winter and spring of 1941-2 was one of the most fertile periods of his life and it seems that this collection was one of his favourites. He read widely in English poetry and criticism and made acquaintance with the writings of TS Eliot, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Keats's letters amongst others.He also began to read Goethe and Kierkegaard. Whilst this extensive reading does not show through specifically in any poem, his handling of longer poems is more assured. There are poems that suggest a nostalgia for the Seville of his youth - not an emotion that <mask> often displays, but a longing for bright sunshine and warmth is easily explicable in the circumstances. It is only in such indirect ways that a reader can sense what was happening around him. Glasgow was bombed 5 times by the Luftwaffe in the Blitz and suffered extensive damage but it would be impossible to gather this from reading <mask>. However, this collection does include "Por otros tulipanes amarillos" an elegy to his former lover Stanley Richardson dead


texts: in an air raid on London, which echoes an earlier tribute published in Invocaciones. In an extended poem, "Noche del hombre y su demonio", he reflects on the course of his life and the possibility of being remembered after his death.The demonio attacks the concept of the poet's vocation and suggests that <mask> might sometimes have been tempted to try to live a normal life. However, the poet fights back by saying that his poetic vocation is what justifies his life and gives it whatever meaning it might have. Even though he might be wrong or suffering from a delusion, his poetry is absolutely necessary to him and he must commit to it totally. "Góngora" is another poem that takes a historical figure and projects the poet's own psychological state onto him. The poem seems to be a development from a set of notes he made in 1937 and collected under the title Góngora y el gongorismo. He sees Góngora as a victim of society and surveys the humiliation and incomprehension from which he suffered when alive, the lack of respect accorded to him by critics and his eventual rehabilitation from neglect in 1927. In these notes, he briefly discusses a recently published work on Góngora by Dámaso Alonso, which discusses the two types of poetry that Góngora wrote - complex and elaborate works such as "Polifemo" or the "Soledades" as against artless ballads and sonnets.In <mask>'s view, however, there is only one poet and the critic ought to try to resolve these two opposing tendencies and demonstrate them as aspects of a single truth. It is characteristic of <mask> to resist the way society tries to appropriate and sanitise the poet, while showing disdain to him while he was alive.