Poetry
For Unamuno, art was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death.
Unamuno was always attracted to traditional meters and, though his early poems did not rhyme, he subsequently turned to rhyme in his later works.
Among his outstanding works of poetry are:
- Poesías (Poems) (1907) — his first collection of poetry, in which he outlined the themes that would dominate his poetics: religious conflict, Spain, and domestic life
- Rosario de sonetos líricos (Rosary of Lyric Sonnets) (1911)
- El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez) (1920) — a religious work, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives: as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption, as a reflection on his Biblical names (Christ the myth, Christ the man on the cross, Christ, God, Christ the Eucharist), as poetic meaning, as painted by Diego Velázquez, etc.
- Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922) — something of a travel book, in which Unamuno expresses profound emotion and experiments with landscape both evocative and realistic (a theme typical of his generation of writers)
- Rimas de dentro (Rhymes from Within) (1923)
- Rimas de un poeta desconocido (Rhymes from an Unknown Poet) (1924)
- De Fuerteventura a París (From Fuerteventura to Paris) (1925)
- Romancero del destierro (Ballads of Exile) (1928)
- Cancionero (Songbook) (1953, published posthumously)
Read more about this topic: Miguel De Unamuno
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
““Ask the perfumers, ask the blacking-makers, ask the hatters, ask the old lottery-office keepers—ask any man among ‘em what my poetry has done for him, and mark my words, he blesses the name of Slum. If he’s an honest man, he raises his eyes to heaven, and blesses the name of Slum—mark that!”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)