Domestic love in the poetry of Jorge Guillén

Scholars have long recognized that love is the central theme of Jorge Guillén's poetry. Following Luisa Perdigó's assessment that the source of love in Guillén's masterpiece, Cántico, is an intimate human one, we show that the domestic character of this love provides the structure for Cántico and subsequent works. This study examines the domestic cycles of Cántico through the literary vehicles of the Genesis account and a modified Neoplatonism, light expressed as being, which is the principal symbol in Guillén's work. The stages of domesticity: the founding of a home, courtship, marriage, loss of a mate, the birth of children, and closure with parents, are introduced through an Adamic figure in Cántico whose identity merges with the poet in succeeding volumes: Clamor, Homenaje, (these along with Cántico were published as Mientras el aire es nuestro in 1968), Y otros poemas, and Final. Because marriage, more than any other dimension of domestic love, shapes his poetry, the bulk of the poems analyzed treat Guillén's personal evolution through marriage. All his works have a common denominator, a concern for the everyday reality, but each has a different identity resting on a vital domestic center. Cántico shows domestic love as sacred myth; Clamor, the fall from a personal Eden into life; Homenaje, friendship anchored by a second marriage; Y otros poemas and Final, the essentiality of domestic love in old age. In sum, domestic love is the means by which Guillén achieves his highest realization in life and in his poetry.