One can best approach José Luis Hidalgo and his poetry from the moment of his death and work one's way backward to his beginnings, for Hidalgo was the supreme poet of death. His dying at the age of twenty-seven in a Madrid sanatorium fosters a romantic vision of a young poet tragically foretelling his own death in a book of poems, Los Muertos (The Dead, 1947). If it were true, the task of putting Hidalgo in his proper place in modern Spanish poetry would be easier. One could imagine him the twentieth-century literary offspring of nineteenth-century poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, whose influence vibrates in Hidalgo's work.

Yet the moving if sometimes angry meditation on death that constitutes Hidalgo's greatest work, Los muertos , was not composed in his dying hours, nor does it reflect some extrasensorial prescience on the writer's part in prophesying his own death. Indeed...