Exile and freedom in the poetry of Manuel Alegre

Abstract

Exile, banishment from one’s homeland, has been perceived and experienced differently throughout time. In the nineteenth-century, Romanticists added to the traditional semantics of the word ‘exile’, denoting the political persecution of which so many have suffered, the notion of existential exile, referring to the experience of being an outsider everywhere, including in one's own country. There is yet a further notion of exile which precedes the former two and is inherent to the human condition within the Jewish-Christian tradition, dating back to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. These three types of ‘exile’, thoroughly discussed by Claudio Guillén in O Sol dos Desterrados (1995), will guide us in our analysis of the poems of Manuel Alegre, exiled in Paris and Algiers between 1964 and 1974. Poetry in which the theme of exile is often present and follows the path of individual, collective, and creative freedom.