185 Facts About Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda Bidon was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27.

Luis Cernuda taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US.

Luis Cernuda was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain.

Luis Cernuda's collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.

Luis Cernuda gave Cernuda encouragement and urged him to read both classical Spanish poetry and modern French literature.

Luis Cernuda's father died in 1920 and he continued to live at home with his mother and sisters.

Luis Cernuda became a Bachelor of Law in September 1925 but was undecided about what to do next.

Luis Cernuda thought about joining the diplomatic service but decided not to on discovering that it would entail a move to Madrid.

Luis Cernuda's mother died in July 1928 and, at the start of September, Cernuda left Seville.

Luis Cernuda spent a few days in Malaga with Altolaguirre, Prados and Jose Maria Hinojosa before moving to Madrid.

Luis Cernuda was starting to realise that poetry was the only thing that really mattered to him.

Luis Cernuda renewed acquaintance with Pedro Salinas and met Vicente Aleixandre.

Luis Cernuda discovered a love of jazz and films, which seems to have activated an interest in the USA.

Between his return from Toulouse in June 1929 to 1936, Luis Cernuda lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital.

Luis Cernuda contributed articles to radical journals such as Octubre, edited by Alberti and his wife Maria Teresa Leon, which demonstrates his political commitment at that time, although there is no evidence that he formally joined the Communist Party.

Luis Cernuda remained there from July to September 1936, but after that he returned to Madrid along with the ambassador and his family.

For perhaps the only time in his life Luis Cernuda felt the desire to be useful to society, which he tried to do by serving on the Republican side.

Luis Cernuda was hopeful that there was a possibility of righting some of the social injustices that he saw in Spanish society.

Luis Cernuda came into contact with Juan Gil-Albert and the other members of the editorial team behind the periodical Hora de Espana and began to work with them.

Luis Cernuda played the role of Don Pedro in a performance of Lorca's play Mariana Pineda during the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia in 1937.

In 1935 at a salon hosted by Carlos Morla Lynch, a diplomat, diarist, amateur musician and closet homosexual working in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, Luis Cernuda met an English poet called Stanley Richardson, nine years younger than him, who was making a brief visit to the country.

At the time, Luis Cernuda thought that he would be away from Spain for one or two months, however this was to be the start of an exile that would last for the rest of his life.

Luis Cernuda wrote an elegy for him which was included in Como quien espera el alba in 1942.

In 1940, while Luis Cernuda was in Glasgow, Bergamin brought out in Mexico a second edition of La realidad y el deseo, this time including section 7, Las nubes.

Luis Cernuda had been afraid that the situation in Spain after the end of the Civil War would create such an unfavourable climate for writers who had gone into exile like him, that his work would be unknown to future generations.

Luis Cernuda regretted leaving Cambridge, despite the range and variety of theatres, concerts and bookshops in the capital.

Luis Cernuda began to take his holidays in Cornwall because he was tired of the big city and urban life.

Luis Cernuda was coming from a country that was impoverished, still showing many signs of war damage and subject to rationing so the shops of New York made it seem as if he were arriving in an earthly paradise.

Luis Cernuda responded favourably to the people and wealth of Mount Holyoke where, "for the first time in my life, I was going to be paid at a decent and fitting level".

Luis Cernuda began to spend his summers in Mexico and in 1951, during a 6-month sabbatical, he met X, the inspiration for "Poemas para un cuerpo", which he started to write at that time.

Luis Cernuda had always had a restless temperament, a desire to travel to new places.

Luis Cernuda had a constant urge to go against the grain of any society in which he found himself.

In 1958, Altolaguirre died and Luis Cernuda took on the job of editing his poetry.

Luis Cernuda spent the summer of 1963 in Mexico and, although he had an invitation to lecture at the University of Southern California, he declined it in August, because of the need to undergo a medical in order to extend his visa.

Luis Cernuda died in Concha Mendez's house of a heart attack on November 5,1963.

Luis Cernuda was buried in the Panteon Jardin, in Mexico City.

Luis Cernuda was one of the most dedicated poets amongst the members of the Generation of 1927.

Luis Cernuda drifted into university teaching simply as a way of earning a living and never held a prestigious post.

Luis Cernuda's published criticism is valuable for the insights it gives into his development as a poet - he tends to discuss the authors and works that had most influence on his poetry and thinking.

Luis Cernuda felt an uncontrollable need to describe this experience.

Luis Cernuda learned English and read widely in English literature.

Luis Cernuda seems to have had a sense that he was predestined to read English poetry and that it corrected and completed something that was lacking both in his poetry and in himself.

Luis Cernuda began to see his work in the classroom as analogous to the writing of poetry - the poet should not simply try to communicate the effect of an experience but to direct the reader to retrace the process by which the poet had come to experience what he is writing about.

Luis Cernuda learned a lot from the literature and greatly admired certain aspects of the national character, as displayed in wartime, but found it hard to summon up affection for the country and its people.

Luis Cernuda tried to sum up his ambivalent feelings in the poem "La partida", but he considered that he failed to do justice to the theme.

The collection was dedicated to Salinas, and Luis Cernuda sent a copy to him in Madrid, where he was spending the university vacation.

Luis Cernuda later recalled that this book was greeted by a stream of hostile reviews that tended to concentrate on a perceived lack of novelty and on its indebtedness to Guillen.

Luis Cernuda dealt with the apparent debt to Guillen in an open letter published in Insula in 1948, in which he points out that in 1927 Guillen had yet to publish a collection.

Luis Cernuda's conclusion is that both of them shared an interest in pure poetry and were influenced by the works of Mallarme - in the case of Guillen this influence was transmitted via Valery.

The young poets of the era, including Guillen, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Prados, Lorca and Luis Cernuda, were all influenced by this blend of classical purity and refined playfulness and Guillen was the ring-leader.

Guillen reaches out joyfully and confidently to reality whereas Luis Cernuda is more hesitant - the world might be an exciting place but something holds him back.

Luis Cernuda wrote an eclogue, heavily influenced by his favourite Spanish poet Garcilaso.

Luis Cernuda's essay included in Poesia y literatura shows that Cernuda considered him to be a kindred spirit; someone for whom poetry was a refuge or means of escape from the trials and difficulties of everyday life; someone who was always trying to find a way to gain access to a realm of harmony.

Luis Cernuda started work on this collection during his period in Toulouse.

Luis Cernuda visited Paris in the Easter vacation of 1929 and was bowled over by the museums and the book-stalls.

Luis Cernuda had not written any poetry since before his arrival in Toulouse in 1928 but he produced the first 3 poems of the new collection in quick succession.

For Luis Cernuda, surrealism was more than a literary phenomenon: it a was the expression of an attitude against conformity.

Luis Cernuda retains the precision and elegance of his language but infuses it with more passion and intensity.

Luis Cernuda continued work on this collection after his return to Madrid.

In reality, this amounts to ignoring classical Spanish verse forms and rhyme schemes, such as letrillas - in fact, from this point on Luis Cernuda rarely uses full rhyme or even assonance - even though he often felt a need to write in a lyrical style.

In "De que pais", Luis Cernuda looks at a newborn child and depicts the betrayal of his sense of wonder and innocence by the way the adult world imposes artificial codes of behaviour and a sense of guilt when the code is transgressed.

Luis Cernuda probably met him in April 1931 and fell head over heels in love.

Serafin was both promiscuous and bisexual, which led to jealousy on the part of Luis Cernuda, he used to ask his lover for money and was generally manipulative.

In later years, Luis Cernuda was embarrassed by the candour with which he wrote about it in Donde habite, attributing this to the slowness of his emotional development, and admitted that this section of his oeuvre was one of the least-satisfying for him.

Luis Cernuda continued to eschew rhyme and assonance but, like Becquer's Rimas the stanzas are short and self-contained and their language is restrained.

Luis Cernuda alludes to it in "Apologia pro vita sua" in Como quien espera el alba and in a short story written in 1937, right in the midst of the Civil War - "Sombras en el salon".

Luis Cernuda cast off all the remaining traces of "pure" poetry.

Luis Cernuda notes that there is a tendency to ramble at the beginning of certain poems in this book as well as a degree of bombast.

Early in 1935, at the height of his relationship with Stanley Richardson, Luis Cernuda dedicated "Por unos tulipanes amarillos" to him.

Exile is a theme that Luis Cernuda will keep developing for the rest of his poetic career.

Luis Cernuda often uses combinations of 7 and 11 syllable lines, the basic form of the silva, a very important form for poets of both the Spanish Golden Age and the Generation of 1898.

Luis Cernuda starts to write dramatic monologues and to work towards a more conversational style of poetry, under the influences of Wordsworth and Browning.

Luis Cernuda wrote "Lazaro" while Chamberlain and Hitler were negotiating over Czechoslovakia, and the poem is written in a mood of melancholy calm, trying to express the disenchanted surprise that a dead man might feel on being brought back to life.

Luis Cernuda was feeling a growing sense of detachment and this is one of the first examples of his characteristic use of a Doppelganger to express, in this case, his sense of alienation and lifelessness.

Luis Cernuda refused the last sacraments and turned away from the crucifix held out by a priest.

Luis Cernuda wanted to see Cernuda and asked him to read a poem.

Luis Cernuda sees in Larra a kindred spirit, embittered, misunderstood, isolated and unsuccessful in love.

Luis Cernuda read widely in English poetry and criticism and made acquaintance with the writings of TS Eliot, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Keats's letters amongst others.

Luis Cernuda expresses this resistance with great power and bitter irony in the poem.

Luis Cernuda's increasing use of this device gave his poetry a duality of rhythm - the rhythm of the individual line and the rhythm of the phrase.

The German poet gave him an example of "a poetic language using long sense periods in extensive poems that develop a theme in depth" and over time the reader can see Luis Cernuda absorbing and building on this example.

Luis Cernuda's voracious reading was taking the place of living.

Luis Cernuda reflects on his power, his age, the blood he has shed, the rumours that circulate about him, his regrets and guilty feelings, what it is like to be an old man desirous of youthful flesh.

Luis Cernuda "is primarily concerned to investigate the relationship between himself and the experience of love, so much so in fact that the loved one has only a secondary importance in the poems".

At times, it could be that Luis Cernuda is projecting his own feelings onto the king.

Luis Cernuda takes as a starting point the king's thoughts of the building as the expression of his faith and centralising political ideas.

Luis Cernuda's last book of poems is a summing up of his career.

Luis Cernuda is a Spaniard despite himself: he has no choice in the matter.

Luis Cernuda urged him to learn French and to read modern French literature, in particular Andre Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud.

Luis Cernuda became acquainted with the poetry of Pierre Reverdy and counts him as a major influence over the poems in his first collection, Perfil del aire, for his qualities of spareness, purity and reticence.

Luis Cernuda read Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror and Preface a un livre futur, although their influence emerged at a later time when Cernuda began to explore the French Surrealist movement.

Luis Cernuda strongly identified with their boldness and their sense of alienation from their society and this emerges clearly in his third and fourth collections.

Luis Cernuda had grown tired of the very restricted range of literature championed by the French surrealists and was starting to interest himself in English and German poetry.

Luis Cernuda was enthralled by the depth and poetic beauty that he discovered in Holderlin and discovered not just a new vision of the world but a new means of poetic expression.

Luis Cernuda was stimulated by the concise and penetrating style of these poems and epigrams.

Luis Cernuda discovered that a poet could achieve a deeper poetic effect by not shouting or declaiming, or repeating himself, by avoiding bombast and grandiloquence.

Luis Cernuda learned to avoid two literary vices, the pathetic fallacy and "purple patches", avoiding undue subjectivity or features that did not fit in with the overall conception of the poem.

Luis Cernuda provides examples of such possible borrowings from Rodrigo Caro, Baudelaire, Luis de Leon and Quevedo.

Luis Cernuda suggests that Lope de Vega and George Herbert were the sources for another 2 poems, "Divertimento" and "La poesia".

Luis Cernuda tried to express something of that experience in "El poeta y los mitos" in Ocnos.

Luis Cernuda was convinced that a poet needs to gain as much variety of experience and knowledge as possible, otherwise his work will be pallid and restricted.

Luis Cernuda frequently tries to create a sense of distance from his poetry by using the "tu" form but the person he is addressing is usually himself.

In part, this is because he was always conscious of a difference between the Luis Cernuda who lived and suffered and the Luis Cernuda who wrote poetry.

Whereas Browning might use a figure such as Fra Lippo Lippi or Andrea del Sarto to live imaginatively what he would not present as his own experience, Luis Cernuda's characters have Luis Cernuda's voice and present versions or aspects of his own thoughts and feelings.

Luis Cernuda was convinced that he was driven by an inner daimon to write poetry and that the poet is in touch with a spiritual dimension of life that normal people are either blind to or shut off from.

Luis Cernuda's urge to write poetry was not under his control.

Luis Cernuda was gratified to learn that he was starting to find an audience and that his name was getting mentioned when Spanish poetry was discussed.

Gebser himself, together with Roy Hewin Winstone, was compiling an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry translated into German and Luis Cernuda tried to get him to exclude any poems by Guillen, Salinas or Damaso Alonso, on the basis that they were teachers rather than poets.

Luis Cernuda only succeeded in getting Alonso excluded and the anthology was published in Berlin in 1936.

Luis Cernuda translated poems by Blake, Yeats and Keats, which were published in Romance in 1940.

Luis Cernuda felt exiled both from happiness and love and began to feel a yearning for his childhood days.

Luis Cernuda continued mining the seam of work that writing prose poetry opened up for him and brought out a second edition in Madrid in 1949, with 48 pieces.

Apart from the short-lived affairs with Serafin Fernandez Ferro and Stanley Richardson, Carmona is the only other person we know about with whom Luis Cernuda had a lasting affair in the 1930s.

Luis Cernuda himself decided not to include it in the third edition.

Luis Cernuda had come to think it was too rhetorical in tone.

Luis Cernuda's visit to Mexico in the summer of 1949, the feeling of being in a Hispanic culture, the temperament of the people, the hot sun all seem to have kick-started his inspiration.

Luis Cernuda wrote these pieces in the course of 1950, once he was back at Mount Holyoke, and the collection was published in 1952.

Luis Cernuda's curiosity was sparked by chance after his arrival in America.

Luis Cernuda reflects that perhaps poverty is the price you pay for being so alive.

Luis Cernuda had been living with his body in one place and his soul in another.

Luis Cernuda published a set of three short stories - Tres narraciones - in Buenos Aires, 1948.

Luis Cernuda finished his translation in 1950 when he was at Mount Holyoke.

Luis Cernuda translated part of the first act of Romeo and Juliet.

Luis Cernuda wrote critical essays throughout his career, many of which were published in newspapers or magazines.

Luis Cernuda gives a survey of what seem to him to be the most important currents in Spanish poetry from the 19th century onwards.

Luis Cernuda covers Becquer and Rosalia de Castro before moving on to a general essay on "Modernismo and the Generation of 1898".

Luis Cernuda ends the collection with some thoughts on developments since 1936.

Luis Cernuda was particularly inspired by his reading of essays by Eliot such as "The Frontiers of Criticism" and "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

Luis Cernuda begins by discussing the purpose of poetry, which for him is a question of conveying his personal experience of the world.

Luis Cernuda's aim is to find "a transcendental plane of existence where the division between the objective and the subjective dimensions of the world is eliminated" and cosmic harmony can be attained.

Luis Cernuda makes a clear distinction between the world's deceptive appearance and the hidden "imagen completa del mundo", which is the true reality.

Luis Cernuda develops the idea of a "daimonic power" that pervades the universe and is able to achieve this synthesis of the invisible underlying reality and its deceiving appearance.

Luis Cernuda clearly valued his supportive words when Perfil del aire first appeared and he does not seem to have done anything to vex Luis Cernuda.

However the latter's assessment is based solely on the evidence of Cantico - the later collections had not begun to appear when Luis Cernuda wrote about him.

One of the first things that Luis Cernuda did on arriving in Madrid in 1928 was to pay a visit to Vicente Aleixandre.

However, they did not immediately become friends and Luis Cernuda blames it on his own timidity and distrust.

Luis Cernuda was struck by Aleixandre's warmth and friendliness, not realising until a later date that his visit had been during the hours when Aleixandre, for the sake of his health, would normally have been resting.

For Luis Cernuda, who was always uneasy about feeling at home anywhere, this was a reason for deciding that he did not want to see Aleixandre again.

Luis Cernuda gives a very favourable account of Aleixandre's poetry in Estudios sobre poesia espanola contemporanea, seeing in his work the struggle of a man of intense feeling trapped inside a sick body, an analogous situation to his own struggle for fulfilment.

Luis Cernuda describes his friend's apparent detachment from the world and unwillingness to engage.

Luis Cernuda first met Lorca in Seville in December 1927, during the celebrations in honour of Gongora.

Luis Cernuda recalled this meeting in an article he wrote in 1938.

Luis Cernuda was struck by the contrast between Lorca's large, eloquent, melancholy eyes and his thickset peasant's body.

Luis Cernuda was not favourably impressed by his theatrical manner and by the way he was surrounded by hangers-on - reminiscent of a matador.

Luis Cernuda next met Lorca three years later in Aleixandre's apartment in Madrid after Lorca's return from New York and Cuba.

Luis Cernuda noticed that something in Lorca had changed; he was less precious, less melancholy and more sensual.

Luis Cernuda is not a whole-hearted admirer of the Romancero gitano, for example, unimpressed by the obscurity of the narratives in many of the individual poems and by the theatricality and outmoded costumbrismo of the collection as a whole.

Luis Cernuda notes that this is a fleeting characteristic in Lorca but more persistent in someone such as Alberti.

For Luis Cernuda, poetry is a serious business and he tends not to approve of people who take it lightly.

Luis Cernuda tends to be more lenient in his judgments of poets who are like him.

Luis Cernuda seems to approve of the fact that after the success of the Romancero gitano, Lorca continued along his own track, not seduced into writing more gypsy ballads.

In Poeta en Nueva York, a collection not published in Spain in Lorca's lifetime, Luis Cernuda identifies the heart of the collection as the "Oda a Walt Whitman".

Luis Cernuda wrote an elegy for Lorca which he included in Las nubes and to the end of his life took pains to try to ensure that the image of Lorca was not academicised, that he remained a figure of vitality, rebellion and nonconformism.

In 1948, Luis Cernuda published an open letter to the famous critic Damaso Alonso in reaction to an article by the latter titled Una generacion poetica.

Luis Cernuda goes on to say that, even after the passage of time, he still prefers some of his earlier poems to certain poems written later.

Luis Cernuda is keen to save his old friend from appropriation by reactionary forces, defending his unconventional lifestyle and everything else about him that would prevent him from being free to live in Franco's Spain.

Alberti invited him to contribute to the celebratory album that he was editing but Luis Cernuda did not follow it up.

Luis Cernuda highlights the fact that Alberti was a virtuoso versifier, able to counterfeit the manner of Gil Vicente or any other folk poet.

Luis Cernuda ends up by praising his poetic fluency and virtuosity while stating that he had nothing to say and that his work is basically deprived of passion and emotion.

Luis Cernuda closes his essay by noting that Alberti's commitment to Communism does not stop him from turning to apolitical subject-matter in which the reader can divine nostalgia for his former success.

Luis Cernuda devoted separate chapters in both Estudios sobre poesia espanola contemporanea and Poesia y literatura to the poetry of Altolaguirre, consistently asserting that he was not a minor poet, despite the critical consensus to that effect.

When in March 1933 their first child died in childbirth, Luis Cernuda dedicated a poem to him - "XIV" in Donde habite el olvido.

Luis Cernuda's writing about the Generation of 1898 is objective but nevertheless lacking in sympathy for the most part.

Luis Cernuda is drawn to the commentaries of Abel Martin and the notes of Juan de Mairena which began to appear in 1925.

However, this is difficult to reconcile with a strand of Luis Cernuda's own poetry, as exemplified by the first poem of the "Diptico espanol" from Desolacion de la Quimera, which is a tirade of invective against Spain that would not seem out of place in Machado.

Indeed, one of Luis Cernuda's major themes is the contrast between modern Spain after the Civil War and the glorious past, which is an important current in Machado's poetry.

Luis Cernuda first met Jimenez in late September-early October 1925 in Seville.

The meeting had been arranged by Pedro Salinas and he suggested to Luis Cernuda that he should ask one of his friends, whose father was a warden of the Alcazar, for permission to visit the gardens, out of hours.

Luis Cernuda was overawed by being in the presence of such an important figure.

Luis Cernuda placed himself in the role of a disciple, just listening to the Master.

Luis Cernuda continued to print vilifications right to the end of his life, which had the effect of turning Cernuda's former admiration into indifference or even worse.

Luis Cernuda wrote many pieces about Jimenez, including a satirical poem included in Desolacion de la Quimera.

Luis Cernuda concludes that Jimenez is a more limited poet than Yeats because the latter put his poetry to one side in order to campaign for Irish Home Rule and to work as director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin whereas Jimenez's whole life was totally dedicated to poetry.

Luis Cernuda devoted himself to aesthetics and did not involve himself with ethical considerations at all.

Luis Cernuda went so far as to write a fan letter, perhaps even a love letter, to Lafcadio, which was printed in El Heraldo de Madrid in 1931.

Luis Cernuda had noticed, or thought he had noticed, that if an elegant women attracts, the elegant man repels.

Luis Cernuda's spirit is like a fly's eye: made of a thousand facets.

Luis Cernuda was well aware that his reputation was of a complicated, tortured individual and this became a matter of concern for him in his later years.

Luis Cernuda makes it clear that this "legend" is a gross distortion of reality:.

Luis Cernuda suffered with material things and with human relationships.

Luis Cernuda's character seems to have left a lasting impression on them which they do not seem to have thought of revising.

Luis Cernuda said it himself:'I have only tried, like every man, to find my truth, my own, which will not be better or worse than that of others, only different.

The work of Luis Cernuda is a road toward our own selves.

Luis Cernuda's work is grounded in reality and he criticises poets, such as Juan Ramon Jimenez, who try to escape from or ignore reality.

Towards the end of his life, Luis Cernuda was gratified to learn that a younger generation of Spanish writers were taking an interest in his work.