Spanish · 1902–1963
Cernuda was taught at Seville by Pedro Salinas, joined the Generation of '27, and spent the rest of his life being the group's difficult member: homosexual and open about it in his verse from 1931, contemptuous of Spanish literary society, and permanently at odds with the taste of his time. He left Spain in 1938 on a lecture trip to Britain and never returned, teaching at Glasgow, Cambridge and then Mount Holyoke before settling in Mexico City, where he died. He gathered all his poetry under one growing title, Reality and Desire, revising and adding to it for thirty years, so that the collection is a single work about the gap the title names. He read the English Romantics and Browning closely and imported their dramatic monologue into Spanish. The poets who came after him in Spain — Gil de Biedma, Brines, Valente — took him as their master rather than Lorca.