Luís Cernuda

Luís Cernuda, a leading voice in the legendary Generation of 1927, is one of Spain’s most important 20th-century poets. He was born in 1902 in Seville, where he studied with Pedro Salinas, and went to Madrid in the late 1920s where he befriended such contemporaries as García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, and Jorge Guillén. After the successful reception of the first edition of his collected poems, La Realidad y el Deseo (Reality and Desire), he left Spain during the Civil War in 1938 and spent the rest of his life in exile, first in Great Britain, then in the U.S., and finally in Mexico where he died in 1963. An edition of his Selected Poems, translated by Reginald Gibbons, first appeared in the US in 1977 and was reprinted in 2000 by Sheep Meadow Press.