The Play of Difference in the Early Poetry of Pedro Salinas

Abstract

The first three books of verse of Pedro Salinas have been puzzling critics for many years. There is general agreement that all of them involve a questioning of external reality, a series of attempts to examine poetically the appearance of things and to seek behind it some essential values. But critics have offered radically different interpretations of this search. Angel del Rio described Salinas' first book, Presagios, as a record of the poet's failure to capture reality's elusive essence in words; he then characterized Salinas' next volume, Seguro azar, as an affirmation of the exactness of the modern world. Marta Morello Frosch has seen in Salinas' portrayal of both nature and modern artifacts a lack of faith in reality; Olga Costa Viva, on the other hand, has found in it an exaltation of the real. Julian Palley has viewed Salinas' early poetry as a desperate quest to create meaning in an enigmatic universe.1 Attempting to transcend these conflicting views, David Stixrude has suggested that this poetry is a tensive effort to find some solution to these oscillations between reality's allure and its decep-