Catalan poetry has remained alive and well throughout the turbulent twentieth century due to the inspiration and courage of a mere handful of writers. Preeminent among those who wrote in Catalan and encouraged study of the Catalan language, literature, and culture was Josep Arseni Vicenç Foix, who wrote as J. V. Foix.

Foix's preeminence is due to several factors: his sheer longevity; his linkage of Catalonia's great medieval and Renaissance literary past to the late twentieth century; his ability to maintain the heritage of the nineteenth century and yet evolve through and beyond visual poetry and surrealism to achieve his own universal view of reality; his breadth of scholarship and literary activity, ranging from the trobar clus (troubadour poetry) to modern art and crusading journalism; his linguistic and stylistic gifts to renew and enrich the Catalan language as it is written and spoken today; and the variety...