Dionysus in the postwar period: the body, the community and the postwar period in the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre

The main emotions that are to be found in the work of Vicente Aleixandre (1898 – 1984) are the poet’s yearnings to overcome the bodily limitations and join the cosmos. Aleixandre inherits this emotion from the surrealist movement. However, the poet’s sociohistorical context affects this emotion in a very special way. As a member of the group of the 27, Aleixandre will see all his fellow poets taking the path to exile after the victory of the Francoist army. Aleixandre, on the contrary, will stay at Spain and suffer an inner exile under an hostile context. The purpose of this essay is to study Aleixandre’s poetry in order to think how this bodily yearning to the Absolute fights and stand against an historical situation of brutal social division where the dionysiac dream of reunion seems a mere utopia.