The Voice Due to You: A Modern Love Story by Pedro Salinas

Posted on Sep 27, 2024 in Language

The Voice Due to You

1. Themes

1.1. Love

This collection of poems, inspired by an extramarital love affair with American poet and professor Katherine Whitmore, reflects the stages of their relationship.

  1. Birth of Passion: A search phase with first meetings, proposals, and questions. Representative poems include 1, 4, and 14.
  2. Climax of Passion: Happy, consummated love dominates, with positive affirmations, adverbs of quantity, and present-tense verbs. See poems 19, 21, and 24.
  3. Separation: Nostalgia and the evocation of the past prevail, with negative semantics, shadows, past-tense verbs, and adverbs of negation. See poems 36, 39, and the last poem.

Beyond the personal anecdote, The Voice Due to You offers a modern, anti-romantic view of love and women:

  • Optimism: Love is a life-affirming force, transforming the individual and their worldview.
  • Balance of Sentiment and Reason: Salinas, a 20th-century intellectual, acknowledges love’s transience and embraces both joy and potential pain.

1.2. Other Themes

  • Female Portrayal: A 20th-century woman, pure, free, and irreducible, contrasts with the male protagonist. The beloved is split between the real and the imagined.
  • The Essence of Poetry: Poetry is a path to deep knowledge, accessing the essence of reality. The book explores the beloved’s true personality hidden beneath appearances.
  • Existential Issues: The end of love brings pain, disappointment, and loneliness, but also deeper understanding. Reflection on time’s passage is nostalgic but not despairing. Love prolongs time and extends it infinitely.

2. Style

2.1. Poetic Language

Salinas combines a conversational tone with influences from various literary trends. The title itself suggests dialogue.

  • Conversational Style: Frequent use of deictic expressions.
  • Simple Syntax: Short, simple sentences, especially during the affair’s peak.
  • Nominal Style: Emphasis on nouns, often in lists, influenced by Juan Ramón Jiménez.
  • Avant-Garde Influences: Novel semantic fields (e.g., related to science) and unusual word associations.

2.2. Imagery

Influenced by Góngora and the Generation of ’27, Salinas uses two types of imagery:

  • Novel images
  • Images from literary tradition

Key imagery includes daring metaphors, antitheses, paradoxes, lists, and repetitions.

3. Meter and Tone

Salinas blends modernity and tradition:

  1. Free Verse: Disregard for traditional elements, with rhythm created through repetition.
  2. Popular Influence: Preference for shorter verses (heptasyllabic and octosyllabic).
  3. Learned Poetry Influence: Use of hendecasyllabic verse for serious tones.

Extensive use of enjambment is also notable. The tone shifts from joyful to hesitant to bitter, reflecting the arc of the love affair.