Quotes by Amado Alonso

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Poetry is not a relief or simply an effusion of a feeling, of a structure... How many of us do not quench in verse the urge to talk about our love? But this has nothing to do with poetry.

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Contemplating a reality circumscribed by himself, the poet penetrates it so deeply with his penetrating gaze that he manages to give us a sentimental intuition about the world and life, thereby raising the humble concrete reality of existence to the high plane of ideal realities and essences. From life to poetry.

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No object finds its place in the poem, other than through the emotion in which the poet envelops it. But all the objects that fall under this magical halo of feeling which the poet releases in the fever of creation, whether they belong to his inner life or to the outer world, become transparent to his penetrating intuitive vision, giving their meaning...

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Metaphors indirectly outline the poetic space, the emotional atmosphere that the poet creates for himself, like the donut silkworm, in which he closes his current world; they indicate the sentimental tension that exists between the poet and his objects...

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Documentary facts provide the opportunity, but do not determine the meaning of our worldview.

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In literary works, the data of experience and life are changed through the magical alchemy of a free creative spirit, the documentary facts having no greater determining power than the palette for the painter, the instruments for the musician or the block of marble for the sculptor...

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Without life experience, which serves as matter or material, neither a work of art nor an artistic construction is possible; but the nature of the work of art is not necessarily conditioned by the nature of life experiences, the artist maintaining his free spirit, to form a new world from that detritus of his own experiences accumulated throughout his whole life, decanted experiences, placed in the depth of the heart... And this new world, as such, is entirely due to the creative forces of the artist; it is an invention not a passive reflex; a painting, not a photograph; a free creation, not an external unconditional product...

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A poem is a message that starts from a concrete and individual spirit - the author's, to another virtual and also individual - the reader's.

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Although the validity of a work is undoubtedly entirely dependent on its intrinsic capacity to produce aesthetic reactions in the beholder independent of the process of elaboration through which it has passed, it is no less true that this capacity to understand it.

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The difference between the practical meanings that we give things and the meaning that only poets find in them, is that the former are fragmentary meanings, abstractions and uses of the object, isolation and use, while the poetic meaning is nothing but that echo of feeling whole and radical of the poet before the world and life... The poet carries the meaning within himself.