Luis Cernuda and the Poetics of Exile

No se quede aqui, no se quede aqui.I These words were spoken to Luis Cernuda in 1948 when he was suffering through his final days at Mount Holyoke College before a summer in Mexico and well after his departure from Spain, a country to which he would never return. In his autobiography, Cernuda recalls this haunting phrase as somewhat of a moral imperative. Like an echo, it repeats itself. The stress on the final syllable of suggests an obsession, an urge, a desire. One familiar with Cernuda's poetry could imagine these words (perhaps with a substitution of the ud. for Cernuda's archetypal tP) as a line of verse from La realidad y el deseo.2 No se quede aqui reveals not only the restlessness of Cernuda's life, but that of his poetry. The speakers in Cernuda's poems always seem to be drawn away from where they stand. Whether in the surrealist stage before the departure, or in the

Art · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Philosophy · Spanish Culture and Identity · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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