Luis Cernuda

Luis Ternuda Vidón was born in Seville on 21 September 1902, into a strict family environment which he himself describes as one of ‘castrating morality’. At the age of fourteen, he attempted to write poems under the guidance of his rhetoric teacher. In 1923, whilst serving his military service on the outskirts of Seville, the call of poetry was revealed to him: "The poetic instinct awoke within me, thanks to a keener perception of reality, whilst I was experimenting, with a deeper resonance, with the beauty and allure of the surrounding world. [...] The essence of the poetic problem, as I understand it, lies in the conflict between reality and desire, between appearance and truth, allowing us to grasp some overall image of the world that we are unaware of, or, as Fichte says, to grasp ‘the divine idea of the world that lies in the depths of appearance’” The influence of Fichte and German idealism fuels the romantic depth in his poetry. In 1924 he published for the first time and in 1927 he released his first book of poetry, ‘Profile of the Air’ (‘Perfil del Aire’, 1924–27). This was followed by the collection “Eclogue, Elegy, Ode” (“Egloga, Elegia, Oda”, 1927–28).

In 1928, he travelled to Toulouse and came into contact with the French Surrealists and André Gide, who would become the most significant influence of his youth and help him come to terms with his homosexual identity. Under the influence of Surrealism, he published the collections *A River, a Love* (*Un Rio, un Amor*, 1929) and *Forbidden Pleasures* (*Los Placeres Prohibidos*, 1931). With the collections "Where Oblivion Dwells" ("Donde habite el Olvido", 1934) and "Invocation to the Graces of the World" ("Invocaciones a las Gracias del Mundo", 1934–35), he returned to more traditional forms, influenced by the poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. In 1936, he published the first comprehensive collection of his first six books, entitled "Reality and Desire" ("La Realidad y el Deseo"), a title that would accompany all subsequent collected editions of his poems.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, he sided with the Republicans and, between October 1936 and April 1937, presented radio programmes alongside A. Serrano Plaja in the Sierra de Guadarrama, north of Madrid. In Valencia, he began composing the poems of the collection *Las Nubes* (1943), a series of elegies and laments on the fate of Spain. In February 1938, his friend, the English poet Stanley Richardson, invited him to give lectures at Oxford and Cambridge. What he believed would be an absence of a few weeks turned into his permanent exile in Great Britain. There, in Glasgow, in 1940, absorbing the influence of Browning and Eliot, he began to compose the series of masterful prose poems "Ocnos" ("Ocnos"), which would be published for the first time during the war, in 1942, in Oxford. Another fruit of his exile was the collection "Like One Who Waits for Dawn" ("Como quien espera el alba", 1941–44). In 1947, accepting an offer from his friend, Concha de Albornoz, to teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he settled in America and later in Mexico. It was there that he wrote the poems for his books *To Live Without Being Alive* (*Vivir sin estar viviendo*, 1944–49), "With the Hours Counted" ("Con las horas contadas", 1950–56), and "Variations on a Mexican Theme" ("Variaciones sobre Tema Mexicano", prose poems, 1949). In 1962, his swan song, "Desolation of the Chimera" ("Desolación de la Quimera", 1956–62), was published; combining his youthful and mature, epigrammatic styles, it contains some of his finest poems.

Luis Cernuda died of a heart attack in Mexico on 5 November 1963, at the home of Concha Mendez, whilst he was planning to continue teaching the following year as a visiting professor at UCLA and the University of Southern California. A few months after his death, the first complete edition of the poem ‘Oknos’ was published, along with the fourth and now definitive edition of ‘La Realidad y el Deseo’ (1964).