BROKEN IMAGES: ELIOT, LORCA, NERUDA

AND THE DISCONTINUITY OF MODERNISM

T. S. Eliot's powerful trope in The Waste Land (" a heap of broken

images"), which may derive in part from Tennyson's Idylls of the King,
has overflowed into Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York and Neruda's
Residencia en la tierra. What these three poets see while "walking
around" is the detritus of urban life, broken and abandoned objects.
With values fractured and icons turned into shards, Eliot's image relates
as well to the discontinuity that underlines many examples of
modernism, not only in the arts but also in science.

Few will contradict Harold Bloom who, Minding himself

uncomfortable with Eliot's Anglo- Catholic, Royalist, classic stance,
nevertheless insists that The Waste Land is "indisputably the most
influential poem written in English in our century" (Bloom,1985: 77).
"Eliot en su poema," Lorca said in 1930 to a Madrid audience,
recognizing that also in Spain to mention Eliot was tantamount to
mentioning The Waste Land (García Lorca, 1990: 259).
The long shadow cast by Eliot's poem in the Hispanic world is still
being charted (Young, 1992; Barón Palma, 1996). For the purposes of
the present paper, it seems certain that Lorca read Angel Flores's
translation of The Waste Land while the latter was working on it. Poeta
en Nueva York contains images that strongly suggest acknowledge of La
tierra baldía (1930). Pablo Neruda, an avid reader in Rangoon of Anglo -
American literature, could hardly have escaped Eliot's poem. The
"pequeño empleado" who seduces the girl next door and takes her to
cheap movies links with the perfunctory seduction carried out by Eliot's

Exemplaria 2 (1), 1998, 1-14. © Universidad de Huelva

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 2 HOWARD T. YOUNG

"small house agent's clerk," and the proliferation of present participles

in "Galope muerto" may be a calque of Eliot's technique in the famous
opening lines of The Waste Land: breeding, mixing, stirring, covering,
feeding.
Poeta en Nueva York and Residencia en la tierra share many general
characteristics with The Waste Land, traits that, although common to the
period, are not as incidental as they might seem. If alienation is part of
the emotional baggage of many artists, it was especially manifest in
multiple ways in Lorca, Neruda, and Eliot. Eliot in the autumn of 1915
came to settle in London, a city at war. The schoolboys he taught
considered him a foreigner, the Bloomsbury group thought him a cold
fish, his marriage unraveled, and while recovering from a nervous
breakdown, he drafted The Waste Land in Lausanne and published it in
1922. Lorca's enchanting personality hid an overwhelming sadness and
anger that colored his work. It was brought on, in part, by the
difficultiees in dealing with his homosexuality, no easy task in Spain in
the twenties. His problems dictated his sympathy with other alienated
groups: Spanish gypsies and Harlem blacks. In the case of Poeta en
Nueva York, alienation was intensified by the blatant linguistic and
cultural otherness into which had so heedlessly plunged. "Nueva York
me parece horrible, por eso mismo me voy allí," he wrote to Carlos
Moría Lynch (García Lorca, 1997: 611). By contrast the excruciatingly
timid Dalí kept saying in his autobiographical Secret Li, fe, "I want to go
to America! I want to go to America!"(Douglas, 1995: 436).
Neruda went against the grain early in his career with, for the
times, the strong erotic pulse of Veinte poemas de amor, and he, too,
eventually found himself exiled in a strange land comforted by constant
reading (much of it in English), and erotic episodes both real and
fancied. On February 22, 1928, he said in a letter: "La vida en Rangoon
es un destierro terrible" (Neruda, 1987: 23). This sense of destierro
terrible to which Eliot first gave such effective expression —The Waste
Land yearns intensely for what is absent (Scofield, 1988: 116)—
doubled, in the case of Lorca and Neruda, by the otherness of language
and culture serves well as en epigraph for our three titles.
The Waste Land, Poeta en Nueva York, and Residencia en la tierra
predictably share a common aggressive attitude toward the prevailing
notion of art.
Eliot's poem exploded like a bombshell in the literary landscape of
1922. Fragmentary, lacking in transitions, and hermetic, it was, some
thought, the product of a deranged mind (a common charge in the case
of our three texts). Its heteroglossia (Greek, Latin, French, German,

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Italian, Sanskrit) inviting incomprehension, its dismantling of the

narrativity so dear to admirers of Browning and Tennyson, its elevation
of allusion to the level of a trope, its introduction into European poetry
of phrases like "slimy belly" and "jug jug," anticipating the polemic
between the followers of Juan Ramón and Pablo Neruda over poetic
diction: all this produced what Calvin Bedient has termed "an
aggression against audience, medium, `art" (Bedient, 1986: 36).
Metaphors of refuse, human waste, and slaughter make an assault
upon the reader of Poeta en Nueva York. Two early critical reactions
validate this point. Conrad Aiken, Eliot's close friend, noted the
prodigality of Lorca's imagination as well as its tendency towards self-
indulgence (Aiken, 1961: 276), and from his exile in Buenos Aires
Alberti said, "Sin bridas y sin estribos, este libro" (Alberti, 1940: 148).
The impression persists today in references such as those by Edward
Hirsch, who in his review of a recent English translation of Poeta called
it perhaps the greatest book of poems ever written on New York, but
also a "perplexing classic," a "dark... howl of loneliness" (Hirsch, 1988:
84). More desolate than The Waste Land, more chaotic than Brecht's
asphalt jungle, Poeta en Nueva York continues to give critics pause
(Sinclair, 1985: 239).
As for Neruda, Amado Alonso promptly noted the shift in
Residencia en la tierra from melancholy to anguish. Veinte poemas talks
about infinite grief, Alonso says, but Residencia en 1a tierra embodies it
in a powerful and shockingly abundant way (Alonso,1951: 13).
It is abundantly clear that these books go fiercely against the grain,
but what especially interests the comparatist is their commonality in
expressing a sense of breakdown of icons, ideas, institutions, and
beliefs, of assuming discontinuity as the norm, of accepting the notion
that life is not ruled by justice, nor mitigated by beauty, that any search
will ultimately encounter, in Lorca's phrase, only a vacuum.
To get a broader impression of this breakdown of meaning and
purpose, I would like to turn to a set piece of Victorian poetry that
was, until World War II part of the Anglo-American canon: Alfred Lord
Tennyson's The Idylls of the King. It leads first to Eliot and then back to
Spain.
One by one the remaining knights of the round table fall in the final
battle. Sir Bevidere, the first and now the last of Arthur's champions,
carries his King "deeply smitten through the helm" (Tennyson, 1983:
293) to a chapel standing near the field of combat. With death upon
him, Arthur asks Sir Bevidere to return Excalibur to the Lady of the
Lake. Twice the knight, besotted by Excalibur's jeweled hilt, lies to

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Arthur, but finally he overcomes temptation and hurls the magic

weapon far into the lake. Just as the famous blade is about to dip into
the water, a mystic arm —clad in the same white samite as the hand
that entrusted Excalibur to the young king— arises, catches it,
brandishes it three times, and then draws the invincible sword under in
the mere.
The final scenes of Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859-1885) give off
a satisfying sense of wholeness: the circle is complete, closure
impressively reached. It is a richly suggestive experience to read
Tennyson's blank verse on the passing of Arthur as the conclusion of
an epoch begun by Malory, a point near the end of a continuum of
romantic legend. Metonymy for a righteous king, the sword does not
suffer the fate of narcissus or Bécquer's hero of Los ojos verdes. It
represents power returned to its source and held in abeyance until
some future time when a "twice-fair" Arthur appears once more on the
field of battle. This sense of completeness and purpose will not be
around long in Western literature. It is what Eliot hoped to recover in
the dust and bewildering fragmentation of time, space and language in
The Waste Land, an interval when the boat responded "gaily, to the
hand expert with sail and oar (vv 418-419)."
The collapse of ontological continuity, the resulting sense of
fragmentation, the foregrounding of irony routinely associated with
modernism in letters and art are elements traceable in fields other than
literature. In 1872 —midpoint in Tennyson"s retelling of the Arthurian
legends for his Queen and country— the German mathematician
Richard Dedekind, recently endorsed as the first modernist' wrote a
paper that accepted the fact that between the numbers 1 and 2 there
existed an infinite set of rational and irrational numbers, thus separating
the digital from the idea of continuity, and placing emphasis on a state
of in between, a situation hardly inimical to the modernist attitude.
A meeting of the Congress of the German Anatomical Society at the
University of Berlin in October 1889 produced an example of
discontinuity of special interest to this paper. An unknown Spanish
scientist read a monograph in very bad French on the discovery he had
made while dissecting the cerebellum of small birds. No real
communication took place until the scientists crowded around to
inspect the slides Santiago Ramón y Cajal had prepared. It is a key
moment in the history of neurology. "Each stained cell stood out

"Separating forever the digital from the continuous, at least in arithmetic, Dedekind
become the West's first modernist in 1872" (Everdell, 1997: 30).

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perfectly against a background of staggering complexity, and no matter

how many times the tiny fibers of one cell met those of another, there
was clearly no physical connection between them" (Everdell, 1997:
100). Previous to Ramón y Cajal's brilliant work the traditional
assumption had been that all the nerve fibers of the gray matter were
mutually connected. Cajal's discovery of the synapse proved to be
another triumph for the in between.
The "Passing of Arthur" betokens in literature the closing of an era
in which art had consented to celebrate continuity and wholeness. At
the same time, it contains markers pointing to high modernism, a
period of fragmentation and breakdown of traditional form of which
Eliot's The Waste Land is the gospel.
The chapel where Sir Bevidere brings King Arthur displays
symptoms of neglect and decay: "A broken chancel and a broken
cross" (Tennyson, 1983: 292). Furthermore, the chapel stands on a dark
strait of "barren land" (Tennyson. 1983: 292). When the funeral barge
appears to take away the dying king, the wailing of three queens is like
"a wind that shrills / All night in a waste land" (Tennyson, 1983: 298).
The whole round table, "which was an image of the mighty world,"
(Tennyson, 1983: 299) has been figuratively broken by the deaths in its
chivalrous circle. Arthur will depart this waste land with its broken
cross, his "light and lustrous curls now parched with dust"(Tennyson,
1983: 299).
The most casual reader of The Waste Land recognizes the terrain,
senses fear in the handful of dust on Arthur's curls, and is led by
Tennyson's broken chancel and broken cross to The Waste Lands
"empty chapel, only the wind's home. / It has no windows and the
door swings," (vv 388-389) and hence to Eliot's "heap of broken
images" (v 22). The Son of Man can find nothing growing in The Waste
Land and knows only a heap of broken images, writes Eliot, drawing
upon Ezekiel 6:3-4. Ezekiel is referring to the images of Israel which
have been crushed by an angry Jehovah. By contrast, Tennyson's
chancel and cross are victims of neglect, symbols for the situation
depicted in Arnold's "Dover Beach," (1867) and they form the context
of Eliot's poem as much as Ezekiel's "heap of broken images."
As a culture of analysis, modernism is at home with bits and pieces
(Everdell 28). Contra esto y aquello, Unamuno's procedure compressed
into a title; Azorin's "primores de lo vulgar"; Gabriel Miró's gems
without closure; Rosa Chacel's Estación. Ida y vuelta: when the history
of Spain's modernism is finally written these are some examples that
will constitute its telling. In the meantime, the story of the breakdown

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of wholeness into bits and pieces in Spain can be taken up by Ramón

Gómez de la Serna.
Mild-mannered, pipe-smoking, he played in Spain the role of a less
pugnacious Ezra Pound. Prometeo had none of the éclat of Vortex or
Blast, but it nicely enabled the transition from symbolism to
modernism. When Le Figaro published Marinetti's futurist manifesto on
20 February 1909, Ramón Gómez de la Serna himself turned the
theatrical and violent Italian rhetoric into Spanish for the April 1909
issue of Prometeo (Marinetti, 1909: 65-73). Marinetti promptly paid a
visit to Spain and obliged Prometeo in 1910 with a "Proclama futurista a
los españoles," in which Spain is exhorted to recover its conquistador
energy and to seek the combination of sex and violence favored by
Marinetti, who seemed to feel that the Spaniards had exhausted their
libido in the conquest of America, when the last flames in hell "lamían
sus nalgas de machos encarnizados sobres los bellos sexos glotones
como ventosas" (Ilie, 1969: 75).
Futurism supplied many an ode to machines, and the results were
often robotic, as in this example from Rafael Laffón, contemporary to
Salinas:
Señorita, saca usted un ritmo
a la Underwood, de nueva emoción;
el ritmo puro del logaritmo
de la sonata `Cotización'.
(Laffón, 1927: 51-52)
Spaniards, on the whole, got only mild cases of futurism. Salinas had a
moment close to Marinetti, when the sight of airplanes at night in the
Parisian sky, caused him to write to his future wife to describe a
completely new emotion that had seized him, "de la audacia, del
esfuerzo, de la fuerza que el hombre ha llegado a desplegar"
(Salinas,1984: 246). As Andrés Soria Olmedo suggests, the scene marks
a transition from the poet who relied heavily in his love letters on
quotations from Juan Ramón Jiménez to a poet now more of the
twentieth century (Soria Olmedo, 1993: 94), one who would write
graceful odes to the typewriter and the light bulb.
Widely traveled, Ramón Gómez de la Serna kept up with literary
movements through out Europe. His tertulia at the Café Pombo, where
Buñuel was a regular, funneled the European vanguardia into Spain. A
visit by Angel Flores provoked the following comment by Ramón,
which is one of the earliest references in Castilian to T. S. Eliot: "La
última obra de Angel Flores ha sido la traducción del poema inglés
Tierra baldía, del extraño T. S. Eliot, el de las palabras de oro, con lo

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cual queda presentada la dificultad pasmosa de revertir cada palabra al

castellano" (Gómez de la Serna, 1931:11).
Upon Ramón Gómez de la Serna's death in 1963, Luis Cernuda,
casting about for a way to characterize a prolific obra of novels,
biographies and hundreds of greguerías, thought of Eliot's famous line:
"These fragments I have shored up against my ruins." "Sin
composición, sin organización fundamental, el conjunto de su obra es
madrepórico [y] la greguería es la unidad que constituye ese conjunto
fragmentario" (Cernuda, 1964:260-261).
The first greguerías appeared auspiciously in the pages of Prometeo
in 1910. Metaphors with a .sense of humor, witty, clever, they flowed in
great abundance from Ramón Gómez de la Serna's pen and, as
Cernuda has also pointed out, many of the metaphors in the poetry of
the Generation of 27 read as if they owed their existence to Ramón's
invention. Taken out of context, Jorge Guillén's "Radiador. Ruiseñor de
invierno" is indistinguishable from these literary bits and pieces
(Cernuda, 1994: 178). Seeking restitution for Góngora, such poets as
Salinas, Lorca, Guillén, Diego could hardly fail to benefit from Ramón's
tongue-in-cheek gongorismos. But the greguerías themselves have no
immediate textual context, they exist somewhere in between haikai and
aphorisms and exemplify the in-between, the synapse that keeps the
whole from its parts.

"WALKING AROUND"

Unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, Wordsworth was willing to tackle

overwhelming questions, but not as a fláneur. Walking the overflowing
streets of England's rapidly developing cities, he found himself
disoriented by so many unknown faces. He fled to country lanes where
he encountered people and places that inspired his homilies or
epiphanies. His common imperative, "Behold," directs the eye to the
source of a perception that, clothed in the rhetoric of lyrical
proclamations or dicta, becomes an event. "I saw a man before me
unawares" (v 55) is prelude to the homily about resolution and
independence built around the leech-gatherer. Similar proclamations
crowd the lines inspired by Tintern Abbey: "Once again / Do I behold
these steep and lofty cliffs" (vv 4-5): "Once again I see / These hedge-
rows" (vv 13-14). They prepare us for Wordsworth's epiphanous joy of
elevated thoughts. He did not collect scattered objects; his eyes beheld
what he could fit into a moral or aesthetic wholeness. There was no in
between.

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Within the metonymy of the poet as a boat in Le Bateau ivre (1871),

Rimbaud turns his "I" into the "otherness" of a sea-going vessel. The
voyage to be undertaken has no fixed port of call, but it will acquire
viewing rights to the ocean of imagination. Time and again, the poet's
voice introduces a stanza with the same verbs of proclamation that
Wordsworth resorted to: je sais, j'ai vu:
Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes
Et les ressacs et les courants: je sais le soir,
L'Aube exaltée ainsi qu'un people de colombes,
Et j'ai vu quelque fois ce que 1'homme a cru voir!
J'ai vu le soleil bas, taché d'horreurs mystiques,
Illuminant de longs figements violets,
Pareils á des acteurs de drames tres- antiques
Les flots roulants au loin leurs frissons de volets.
(Rimbaud, 1967: 116)
These are not typical announcements of romanticism made in
preparation for the mingling of identity with the universe, but rather a
call to share in a vision stripped of transcendence, or rather a vision in
which transcendence attaches to objects by the strength of adjectives
and metaphors: the sun spots endowed with mystical horrors, the violet
clots across the sky, or a metaphor that anticipates Lorca's imagination
—waves roll like shivering shutters. All these things the poet has seen,
plus, for he is still a seer, things that others only think they see. But by
the time of Les Illuminations, Rimbaud has become "resolutely
discontinuous" (Everdell, 1997: 90). Here lies an anaphora to supply
rhetorical power to his list-making; it y a replaces j'ai vu, but the
objects themselves have no direct claim on reality:
Il y a une horloge qui ne sonne pas [is it broken?]
Il y a une fondriére avec un nid de bêtes blanches.
Il y a une cathédrale qui descend et un lac qui monte.
(Rimbaud 1967: 216)
Walkers in time became street walkers in real urban places, Paris first,
then London and eventually New York. "Rhapsody on a Windy Night,"
shows Eliot the fláneur reporting on the detritus of the city scene, its
broken and abandoned bits and pieces. Catalogues could be made of
broken blinds, scattered newspapers, body parts but rarely whole
bodies (Lentricchia, 1994: 248). But let the poetry speak for itself: "A
crowd of twisted things" (v. 24), "a broken spring in a factory yard /
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left" (v. 30-31). We
have returned to the recognizable and found it wanting. The Waste
Land, Poeta en Nueva York, and Residencia en la tierra are about the

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gutting of form, the spring that retains the shape of force but has no
substance. These tropes arguably reflect cultural infirmity, but they also
sound surprisingly like Hegels's description in 1844 of the appalling
waste and debris occasioned by urban crowding.
Spain's earliest collector of shards was the indomitable Ramón
Gómez de la Serna. If bits and pieces seem to suggest a sense of parts
greater than the whole, then we might be forgiven for thinking that the
first step in reconstruction is the making of a catalogue. To read
Rimbaud, Whitman, or Lorca in the tradition of the catalogue dichter is
one way, as Amado Alonso saw, to keep enumeration from becoming
chaotic.
Today Ramón Gómez de la Serna stands side by side with
Baudelaire's fláneur and Whitman's maker of lists. From one cataloguer
to another Pablo Neruda wrote: "Abrió Ramón la cajonería del mundo y
fue catalogando las cosas y los seres, los más harapientos y los más
eminentes" (Gómez de la Serna, 1971: 8).
Ramón's purpose, however, was not to reconstruct. In his work
objects seem to acquire an ontology. Borges himself, tantalized by the
kaleidoscopic nature of the world, saw that Ramón Gómez de la Serna
caressed and flattered objects without any "prejuicio de unidad"
(Ugarte, 1996: 104). He treats with uniformity of tone the
conglomeration of cheap jewelry and worn furniture in El Rastro,
Madrid's famous flea market, and the arrival of urinals for the Puerta
del Sol. Even his autobiography makes no attempt to give the reader "a
picture of wholeness or a transcendent truth" (Ugarte, 1996: 112). 2
Dalí preferred to record, in the disordered manner of the surrealists,
what he saw while walking around. He scattered his precisely drawn
beaches with strange creature-like objects, inspired by Yves Tanguy,
apparent eruptions from the sea, and added recognizable human
objects that were flare-ups from his subconscious.
In October 1927, he trespassed on Lorca's territory with some verse
in Catalan. Boasting that only painters were producing genuine poetry,
he duly sent Lorca a copy in Spanish. Lorca's reaction to Dali's
catalogue of disjointed objects is unknown (Gibson, 1997: 173), but the
list shows how Miró, Gasch, Foix and the ambience of L'Amic de les
Arts had drawn Dalí closer to surrealism. And it is strongly suggestive
of the kind of language that will appear in Poeta en Nueva York.

2It could be argued that Azorin's lists belong in this account. But I read the catalogue of
the contents of a house in Castile as part of a whole, an ongoing story that brings out the
genius loci of Spain, or emphasizes the time-bound nature of viewer and viewed. For a
further opinion, see Ugarte, 1996: 157-183.

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Poema de las cositas

Mi amiga tiene la mano de corcha y llena de puntas de parís [sic].
Mi amiga tiene las rodillas de humo.
El azúcar se disuelve en el agua, se tiñe con la sangre y salta como
una pulga.
Mi amiga tiene un reloj de pulsera de macilla [sic]...
Cositas, cositas, cositas, cositas...
(Sánchez Vidal, 1988: 164-165)
Now it was Lorca's turn to walk the streets, parks, and beaches of New
York City, where the breakdown of continuity, the shock of New York's
masses would never inspire a diminutive.
Poeta en Nueva York repeats, copies, and traces its opening poem,
"Vuelta de paseo ", which might be paraphrased á la Wordsworth as
thoughts recollected after walking around:
Asesinado por el cielo.
Entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe
y las formas que buscan el cristal,
dejaré crecer mis cabellos.
Con el árbol de muñones que no canta
y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.
Con los animalitos de cabeza rota
y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.
Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo
y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.
Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.
¡Asesinado por el cielo!
(García Lorca, 1986 [22nd edition]: 447)
The trope of brokenness, reinforced by the castrated tree that holds no
birds, the dry feet that rustle as in The Waste Land, an identity that will
not hold steady, blocked creativity ("mariposa ahogada en el tintero "),
the echo from Eliot: "I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / With
my hair down, so" (vv 132-133): "Vuelta de paseo" subsumes in its
twelve lines everything that might happen to the modernist fláneur.
Neruda's "Walking Around" begins on the note of ennui associated
with the fláneur: "Sucede que me canso de ser hombre;" vacilates
between hastío and typical avant-garde animosity towards the
bourgeois: "Sin embargo sería delicioso / asustar a un notario;"
expresses a desire to escape passivity: "No quiero seguir siendo raíz en
las tinieblas... / absorbiendo y pensando, comiendo cada día;" and
lanches into its famous list of sights:

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Hay pájaros de color de azufre y horribles intestinos

colgando de las puertas de las casas que odio,
hay dentaduras olvidadas en una cafetera,
hay espejos
que debieran haber llorado de vergüenza y espanto,
hay paraguas en todas partes, y venenos, y ombligos.
Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos,
con furia, con olvido,
paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia,
y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre:
calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran
lentas lágrimas sucias.
(Neruda, 1987: 220-221)
Neruda's caminante speaks with none of Eliot's distance; the paseo at
various times provokes calm, hatred, oblivion; feelings are projected
onto objects: the underwear, towels, and shirts weep dirty tears. It is "la
noche de largas listas," says Neruda in an early Residencia poem (186).
Neruda's fragments are partially held together by an unusually strong
sense of self, and by the feeling that the objects need Neruda to bear
witness. The "golpe de objetos que llaman sin ser respondidos" in "Arte
poética" are constantly being recognized by the ambulatory yo. "Me
piden lo profético que hay en mí," he writes in Residencia's "arte
poético," underscoring the need for communication with a vaster
audience that enabled him to escape with relative ease the "seres rotos"
(91) of his Rangoon waste land. The world, said Neruda to a reporter in
April 1936, "da la sensación de que se hace pedazos" (Lozada, 1971: 77
n 19). By then personal waste lands were fast being politicized across
Europe.
Eliot's speaker in "The Burial of the Dead," echoing Ezequiel,
explains the cause for the ignorance prevalent among the inhabitants of
The Waste Land: "You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap
of broken images" (vv 20-22). I have tried to show how Eliot's phrase
"a heap of broken images" served as a metonymic trigger to portray the
breakdown of knowledge and values that so heavily contribute to the
despair present in The Waste Land, Poeta en Nueva York, and
Residencia en la tierra, and I have suggested that the image bespeaks
the discontinuity and break up that may be taken as general
characteristics of modernism. The notion of ongoing narrative or
purpose, strongly implanted in romantic poets and convincingly
underpinning Tennyson's the Passing of Arthur gave way to the night
of long lists, the making of one's way through shards. Eliot indeed

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produced an emblematic phrase for the age that will not cease echoing
through these books. Lorca críes "Todo está roto por la noche ... Todo
está roto los tibios caños / de una terrible fuente silenciosa" ("Paisaje
de la multitud que orina" 476) and laments the endless strewing of
"objetos abandonados" ("El rey de Harlem" 461). Neruda wrote to his
Argentine friend Eandi: "... no se halla usted rodeado de destrucciones,
de muertes, de cosas aniquiladas?" (Neruda 1987: 28), an observation
carried forward to one of the first poems of Residencia en la tierra:
"Estoy solo entre materias desvencijadas" (98).
Visions close each hook. Eliot's steady hand on the rudder prepares
the way for his conversion, Lorca forsees a kingdom of wheat ushered
in by un niño negro, and Neruda finds a prophetic strength. Eliot and
Neruda will go forward, but the shots in Víznar that end Lorca's life
once again turn the heap of broken images into the emblem of an age.

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 14 HOWARD T. YOUNG

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HowAiD T. YOUNG
POMONA COLLEGE
CLAxEMO^rr, CAu1 or IA

Universidad de Huelva 2009