Vicente Aleixandre’s bisexuality was well known to his circle of friends, but he never admitted it publicly. He had a long-term love relationship with the poet Carlos Bousoño. [1]
Vicente Aleixandre, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on 26 April 1898 in Seville, Spain. His father’s work as a railway engineer took the family to Malaga and then to Madrid, where he would live for decades. Young Vicente did not grow up with literary aspirations, but he had an instinctive responsiveness to beauty, order and the natural world, traits that would mark his mature poetry.
Aleixandre’s education followed a conventional course. He studied law and then political economy, preparing for a career in business. Quietly, however, another world was opening up to him. In his twenties, he read voraciously, discovering the modernist and avant-garde writers who were shaping European poetry. Their boldness fired his imagination and encouraged him to question older traditions.
A severe illness in 1925 was a turning point. A long convalescence allowed him to begin writing poetry in earnest. His early verse—largely in free form—embraced the surrealist mode flourishing across Europe at this time. Nature, for him, became both symbol and solace: the earth and sea appear again and again, beautiful yet shadowed by melancholy. Many of these poems express his belief that modern life had lost the passion and spirit he perceived so vividly in the natural world.
His debut as a poet came with Ambito (Ambit), a poetry collection published in 1928. It was followed by Destruction or Love (1935), one of his most celebrated works, and Passion of the Earth (1935), books that helped define his reputation in the years before the Spanish Civil War.
He joined a circle of young writers who shared an admiration for poetic innovation and would later become known as the Generation of ’27. The group included Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, and Pedro Salinas.
Vicente Aleixandre died in Madrid in December 1984, aged 86.
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