Miguel Hernández: Love, Death, and Social Commitment in Poetry

Life, Death, and Love in Miguel Hernández

To sum up Miguel Hernández's poetry, one could qualify it as love poetry. No poem falls outside the meaning of love: nature, women, sons, friends, the people, or life itself. We can distinguish several approaches: sexual awakening, love, pain, love-hate, hope...

Furthermore, Miguel Hernández's poetry is a poetry of experience. Indeed, the poetic world is defined by love and death, intertwined with life. These are the three main themes, or variants of the same theme: love. Life and death are joined in two ways:

1. In the existential sense, man is a being born to die.
2. In the sense of solidarity of death easily embraced.

Life definitely embraces death in the late poems and ballads of Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias. Love and death are united so that human life is disrupted as a species. The life of humans, such as blood and love, and death creates many metaphorical fields and highly personal images in the poet. All of his work revolves around the mysteries of life, generation, and death: Love as a symptom of life, light, clarity... but on the other hand, love as destruction, death, darkness, and so on.

The Social Commitment and Poetic Voice of Miguel Hernández

In the first stage, Miguel Hernández was in ecstasy of religious expression and euphoric assumption of theocentric theory. The first play published is religious, condemning the acts of the revolutionary peasants and sharply criticizing the policy positions of the anarchists, communists, and labor unions.

The social situation of politics at the time was the same as the late nineteenth century: A conservative clergy and dominant authoritarian military class (one civil guard repressor, a rogue military for the coup).

The major commitment that enhances the figure of Miguel Hernández is that he forces himself to defend the land, to dignify the man in the field, and foster awareness of their potential rights. He is shifting towards the weaker side of the helpless worker. Thus begins a new period with the new social class that claimed responsibility for their rights: the working people.

He abandoned pure poetry and old Catholic themes. In the second half of 1935, he started a poem with the first impure social protests. Miguel Hernández bases his political commitment not on theory but on everyday experiences suffered by him and his family.

One of the most successful facets of Miguel Hernández was indeed his concern about the areas of labor, wage exploitation, poverty, or hunger. His poetry is a synthesis of shared pain and denunciation against injustice.