Situating Pedro Salinas’ El contemplado in the Complete Poetry: the trascendence of romantic dialectic and the Lacanian imaginary

Resumen

It is safe to say that most critics see constants in Salinas' poetic work, a common one being his preoccupation with reality, whether that is understood as the rejection of permanence or its pursuit or a vacillation between the two. Similarly, and equally debated, is whether the poetry's perceived desire for an idealized timelessness (as opposed to the Machadian "word in time," more concerned with the human condition) does or does not place Salinas in the Romantic tradition. One way of resolving this dilemma is to see Romanticism itself—in its English expression, with which Salinas was very familiar and which he greatly admired—as a posture which privileged dialectic, and to read Romantic, and post-Romantic poetry—and thus Salinas' poetry²—as the site of a dialectical struggle between the two ways of being a poet: the way of the seer, Baudelarian interpreter of the world's hieroglyphics, whose language recreates an intuited epiphany not vouchsafed to the ordinary person; and the way of the witness, who testifies to the temporal flux of the human condition. Salinas' poetry, from the beginning, is indeed the locus of such a dialectic: Presagios poems about mirrors, with their evocation of rupture and of deception, are in this light understandable in the company of so many others of that collection exulting in the poem's ability to capture and even exalt reality.