[…] Both Jorge Guillén and Claudio Rodríguez are examples, in their two first books, of something that has very rarely occurred in Western culture since Romanticism: endless optimism, joy, enthusiasm before the reality of things and matter.
[…] However, the endless enjambment in Claudio produces an effect that hides rhythm and rhyme while keeping it. This provides a curious game, similar to coquetry: revealing and, without stopping this, hiding what is revealed, and with a very particular sense. I think that this is related with the apparent ruralism that Rodríguez loves so much. Curiously enough, this is nothing more than a metaphor or an allegory of that transcendence of the great flight our poet aspires to.
[…] Let’s now discuss the most surprising feature of this amazing poet: his difference with all the post-war poets, while in the most essential aspect he is still part of them. Postwar is commanded by realism, especially in one of its forms: Social poetry. Claudio joins this realism with the strength and the magic of the Castilian ruralism by which he is characterized. Yet, as I have said, he transcends it, and when he refers to the clothes hanging, for example, the topic turns out to be dysemic: it certainly refers to clothes hanging, but at the same time it is a metaphor of the soul, of the aerial and the transcendent. And if he mentions the hiring of workers, he is neither only nor mainly alluding to that fact taken from reality: What he sings about is human solidarity too. And there is another great topic, equally pertinent to poetry contemporary to our poet.
[…] There is, in fact, an accurate adjustment between the natural freshness of our poet’s voice and the natural freshness of the world sung by him. On the one hand, Claudio takes an interest in the purest and truest beings around him (a sparrow, little scraps of paper flying in the wind, an old peasant full of love and truth); on the other hand, he speaks to us with a language that has not been learnt from literature, but from life, in the speech of the square at her hometown Zamora, so ancient and castizo as clear, a speech unstained by the foreign-ish expressions from which we are assaulted nowadays from everywhere.
Claudio Rodríguez does not need to sign his works. “You will know them by their works”, we could evangelically say about him. In this sense, Claudio Rodríguez is as distinguishable and singular as Juan Ramón, Guillén, Aleixandre or Lorca could be in our century.
[…] Claudio Rodríguez reverts the terms of the generational formula and brings the song to the forefront. He therefore claims the song as the main component of lyricism, what confers added singularity to his voice.