Destruction or Love
by Vicente Aleixandre
Summary
This is a poetry collection, written in 1932 and 1933 and first published a few years later, and it has no plot to summarize, only an argument the poems keep making in different ways: that love and destruction are not opposites but the same force seen from two angles. Vicente Aleixandre writes desire as something that dissolves the line between a body and the sea, the earth, or another person, treating human beings as one kind of material among many rather than as the center of the world the poems describe. Annihilation and union arrive, again and again, as versions of the same event, a single force strong enough to erase whatever separates one thing from another.
The poems continue the surrealist direction Aleixandre had already been working in his earlier collection Swords Like Lips, mostly in free verse that runs in long, unpunctuated waves of image rather than argument, though a few poems fall back on older, stricter forms borrowed from classical Spanish verse. The effect across the whole book is closer to incantation than to narrative: metaphors pile onto metaphors, the boundary between a lover's body and a landscape keeps dissolving, and the reader is meant to feel the force the poems describe rather than follow a story built out of it.
Reading it means giving up on a conventional throughline and instead following one obsessive idea through dozens of variations, which rewards a reader with patience for dense, image driven poetry more than one looking for a single memorable line to carry away. It suits anyone curious about Spanish surrealism at its most intense, from the years just before the civil war scattered the poetic generation Aleixandre belonged to, and it remains the collection most often named when critics try to explain what made his particular strain of surrealism distinct from his contemporaries.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Vicente Aleixandre the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars. Destruction or Love, which had already won Spain's National Prize for Literature in December 1933, before the book was even in print, is the book most closely tied to that citation, and it announced the surrealist turn that came to define Aleixandre's whole body of work.
Aleixandre was the first Spanish author living in Spain to win the prize since the civil war; Spain's previous laureate, Juan Ramón Jiménez in 1956, had won it as an exile in Puerto Rico, and the two before him, José Echegaray in 1904 and Jacinto Benavente in 1922, had won long before the war. Aleixandre himself remained in Spain through the war and the dictatorship that followed it, unlike most of his Generation of '27 contemporaries, several of whom went into exile or did not survive. Poor health kept him from the Stockholm ceremony; his friend and fellow poet Justo Jorge Padrón read his speech of thanks at the Nobel banquet.