Date of Award

6-2014

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Modern Languages and Literatures

Language

Spanish

Keywords

poetry, homosexuality, exile, stratification

Abstract

The life experiences and the level to which assimilation is possible following a political exile can be modulated by many factors including the age, gender, ethnicity, religion, political ideologies and sexual orientation of the individual condemned to exile. Whereas, previous academic studies have been devoted to investigating the roles of many of these influences on the experience of exile, the role homosexuality plays has been almost completely neglected in the academic literature. This paper uses the great homosexual poet of The Generation of 27, Luis Cernuda, as a case study to explore the issue of how homosexuality affects the experience of exile by means of both historical and poetic analysis. What this analysis suggests is that Luis Cernuda was forced to bear an exile far more extreme than simply a traditional political exile. Instead, Cernuda was condemned to a life of exile within exile as a result of both his fervent commitment to maintain his hard earned personal identity along with his poetic aspirations to reach a world that overcame all of the imperfections of the reality he was forced to live in. Together, these separate commitments to the elements that made up his personal identity as well as his poetic vision conspired to create for Cernunda an experience of an exile in its most ultimate incarnation or, in other words, a complete exile.

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