24 Facts About Pedro Salinas

Pedro Salinas y Serrano was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic.

Pedro Salinas began to study Law at the Universidad central in 1908 and in 1910 started to study History concurrently.

Pedro Salinas had married Margarita Bonmati, a Spanish girl of Algerian descent whom he had met on his summer holidays in Santa Pola, Alicante, in December 1915.

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

Pedro Salinas continued to publish poems in magazines such as Espana and La Pluma.

Pedro Salinas was to edit the volume devoted to the sonnets: a project that never came to fruition.

Pedro Salinas had been dividing his time between the faculties of Wellesley, Middlebury, and Johns Hopkins but in 1940 he took up a permanent post at Johns Hopkins where he remained for the rest of his life, including long spells of travel in South America and a period of 3 years at the University of Puerto Rico.

Pedro Salinas was the father-in-law of Spanish historian and writer, Juan Marichal.

Marichal would later publish Salinas' complete works, Three Voices of Pedro Salinas, which was released in 1976.

Pedro Salinas's daughter edited his poetry and incorporated an introduction by his old friend Jorge Guillen.

Pedro Salinas's poetry falls naturally into 3 periods: the first three books, the love poetry, and the poetry of exile.

Pedro Salinas writes as if he is the first person to see a particular object or feel a certain emotion and he tries to convey to the reader this sense of the wonder hidden behind familiar, banal things.

At Johns Hopkins, Pedro Salinas published a collection called Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, whereas Guillen's Norton lectures were called Language and Poetry.

Pedro Salinas seems to want to show us the poetic reality behind or beyond appearances, to educate us into how to see whereas Guillen gives us an account of the thoughts and sense-impressions going through his own mind: the reader is a viewer of this process not a participant in it.

Vicente Aleixandre recalled visiting Pedro Salinas and finding him at his desk with his daughter on one knee and his son on the other and stretching out a hand clutching a pen to shake hands with his visitor.

Pedro Salinas tended not to use traditional Spanish verse-forms in his poetry but neither did he write free verse.

In "Navecerrada, abril" and "35 bujias", Pedro Salinas uses a riddle technique which becomes a signature device in later collections.

Pedro Salinas develops the conceit of the filament of an electric light as a princess locked in a glass prison, guarded by rays of sunshine.

Pedro Salinas grew up in the capital city and is arguably more of an urban person than most of his generation, who tended to come from provincial capitals.

Pedro Salinas continues to be photographed and mentioned in the gossip-columns and nobody notices that she is dead.

Pedro Salinas even quotes the view of the critic Leo Spitzer that this is love poetry where the beloved is a phenomenon created by the poet, whilst asserting that this point of view is fundamentally mistaken.

However, on learning that Pedro Salinas's wife had discovered what was happening and had tried to commit suicide, she broke off relations.

Pedro Salinas reasserts his belief in the most enduring factors of life, not tied to any particular set of historical circumstances and therefore able to outlast them.

The painter Carlos Marichal considered his grandfather Pedro Salinas to be a mythic cultural figure.