Few modern poets, in any language, give us this chilling sense of knowing ourselves to be before a man who really speaks, effectively possessed by the fatality and the lucidity of passion. If it were possible to define in a phrase the place Cernuda occupies in modern Spanish-language poetry, I would say he is the poet who speaks not for all, but for each one of us who makes up the all. And he wounds us in the core of that part of each of us "which is not called glory, fortune, or ambition" but the truth of ourselves. --Octavio Paz.

A study of the work of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963). The works of the twentieth-century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) are characterised by their fragmentary and disunified nature, with a wide range of complexities and contradictions. Concentrating on the well-known La realidad y el deseo, Dr McKinlay considers the poems from the perspective of the widespread loss of faith in God, exploring the tension between Cernuda's perception of chaos and desire for order, which co-exist in dialectical opposition. NEIL C. MCKINLAY is college lecturer in Spanish at New College, Oxford.

While Cernuda's verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life's journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity; the poet doesn't set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. But is it truly ours, this life we live?" Luis Cernuda (1902–1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain's Generation of 1927, which included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Guillen.

Luis Cernuda (1902 -1963), was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK. This became the start of an exile that lasted till his death. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. This comprehensive bilingual Spanish-English anthology is edited and translated by Stephen Kessler.

"When the sixteen-year-old Octavio Paz (1914-1998) discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation, it 'opened the doors of modern poetry'. The influence of T S Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz's attitude towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll's study is the first to trace the history of Paz's engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By positioning Eliot in a Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on one of the capital figures of Anglo-American modernism."

The final poems of this important Spanish poet.