With a writing career that began in the mid 1950s, Carlos Sahagún belongs to the second generation of post-civil-war poets, the so-called children of the war. Although his subject matter is largely drawn from his experiences, his poems evoke the collective experience of all those who lived through the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. As his work evolved into the 1970s, his poetry increasingly came to reflect his personal commitment to social and political change.

Sahagún was born during the civil war, on 4 June 1938, in Onil, in the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante. He left in 1956 to study at the University of Madrid, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in romance philology in 1959. Although his first collection of poetry, Hombre naciente (Growing Man), was published in 1955 when he was only sixteen, and he had won the 1956 José Luis Hidalgo prize for several...