Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti
Published 1929 · 9,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is Concerning the Angels to read?
Concerning the Angels scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Plain vocabulary used in violently unfamiliar combinations, with the difficulty in the collisions rather than the words.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Fragmented free verse with broken lines, unresolved constructions and syntax that mimics dissociation.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Emotional states are presented as personified forces with no narrative or situational grounding at all.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Short, sparse poems, though the density of unexplained imagery per line is very high.
- Narrative indirection: 84 out of 100
- The biographical crisis behind the book is never mentioned; everything arrives as allegory whose referents the reader must guess.
- Symbolic density: 88 out of 100
- The book is a taxonomy of invented symbolic figures, and every angel is a compressed and unglossed emblem.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- The despair is unmediated, though the bureaucratic naming of angels — of numbers, of the coalmines — introduces a bleak comedy.
- Resolution withholding: 86 out of 100
- No angel is reconciled, no crisis passes, and the sequence ends in the same darkness it opened in.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Three parts of short titled fragments with no narrative order, unified only by the governing conceit.
How Concerning the Angels is regarded
Concerning the Angels holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.