Vicente Aleixandre’s Stream of Lyric Consciousness

Focusing on La destruccion o el amor (1935), this study explores Aleixandre’s surrealist masterwork from an intertextual perspective inspired by the theories of Harold Bloom, Michael Riffaterre, Gerard Genette, and others. Among the cultural and literary intertexts considered are surrealism and the seminal role of Freud, metaphor, genre, narrative technique, and ancestor poets. An intertextual tack is instrumental in perceiving logic behind Aleixandre’s surrealism, an irrational-appearing poetry widely taken as privately produced and self-contained. Key to the poetic logic of Aleixandre’s surrealism, the intertextual horizon throws light on Aleixandre’s place in his own generation and in literary history.