Poetry
La casa encendida
Not translated into English
Luis Rosales · 1949
Synopsis
A single long poem in free verse, without stanzas, mixing narrative and meditation. A man comes home at night to his house, at the end of a life that has become solitary, and walks through it room by room. Memory gradually gives back to him those he loved: his father, lost friends, among them the poet Juan Panero, a woman he loved, childhood. Phrases return, taken up and varied, and the dead come to sit among the living, as if death interrupted nothing.
Context
The poem appeared in 1949. The author later revised it and expanded it until a new version, published in 1967 by the Revista de Occidente. The book marks a turning point in his work: he abandons the classical stanzas of his early years for a unitary composition, in which he borrows techniques from César Vallejo and Antonio Machado. Critics regard it as his best work.
Who it is for
A single long poem, in free verse and without stanzas, which is read in one sitting; two versions circulate, from 1949 and 1967.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the major books of postwar Spanish poetry; it gave its name to a cultural centre in Madrid.