Since the mid 1940s Carlos Edmundo de Ory has defended his vision of imaginatively wielded language as the key to transcendence over personal anguish and to the creation of poems that illuminate a common humanity. During the first two decades of Ory's writing career his work remained largely unknown; critics considered it an anachronism, interesting primarily because of its link to the ephemeral avant-garde movement called postismo, co-founded by Ory, Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro, and Italian poet Silvano Sernesi in Madrid during the 1940s. Since the 1970s, however, critics undertaking a reappraisal of Ory's work have come to recognize its scope and originality and have deemed it an important precursor of the language-centered poetry which gained critical prominence in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s.

Ory was born on 27 April 1923 in Cádiz. His father, Eduardo de Ory, a modernist poet, was the founder of the Academia...