When Guillermo Carnero's Dibujo de la muerte (A Drawing of Death) was published in 1967, critics immediately pointed out the sharp difference separating this book from the mainstream of postwar Spanish poetry. From 1939, the year the civil war ended, until the second half of the 1960s, poetry in Spain dealt mostly with social topics. In his theoretical Anatomía del realismo (Anatomy of Realism), playwright Alfonso Sastre summarizes the aesthetic creed of this period when he states that social discourse is given preference over artistic discourse. Individual exceptions to this general orientation are rare in Spanish letters (Jaime Gil de Biedma, Claudio Rodríguez, José Angel Valente, Francisco Brines), and the practice of nonsocial poetry was generally reduced to underground groups such as "Cántico" (Canticle), an excellent and almost unknown group of Andalusian poets to whom Carnero paid tribute in a book-length study published...