José Angel Valente is in a group of Spanish poets who came to the fore in the late 1950s and 1960s, which also includes such writers as Claudio Rodríguez, Carlos Sahagún, Francisco Brines, Eladio Cabañero, and Angel González. The work of this group cannot be classified very easily: it reaches beyond the social orientation of earlier post-civil-war poetry and also deepens the philosophical queries about humanity's position that appear in the work of earlier poets such as José Hierro and Blas de Otero. The common denominator of the poetry of this later group can be found not in its proclamation of certain shared themes or its utilization of a particular style but rather in its attitude regarding the creative act. Poetry is seen as both the cognition and the communication of modern human reality. Thus poetry is not...