Sobre los ángeles: surrealism, subversion and disalienation in the poetry of Rafael Alberti

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of a selection from Sobre los ángeles (1929), a book of poems by Spanish author Rafael Alberti. Based on texts by Michael Lowy, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, surrealism will be considered not only as an aesthetic movement but also as what Lowy (2018) calls a state of mind. We hypothesize that Sobre los ángeles is an example of a “protest against limited rationality”, in opposition to a society based on an alienating structure, or rather, one confined in a steel cage, as Max Weber (1920) calls it. Finally, we will propose an interpretation of three poems that seem central to us in relating surrealism to one of the Spanish poet’s essential works.