As a Catholic poet José María Valverde is broadly representative of the literary situation in post-civil-war Spain. His poetry of the 1940s and 1950s appeals, in conversational language, to the general reader's concern with daily life, religion, and family. Later, in the course of a busy career as a teacher, translator, and literary historian, he introduces moderate social criticism and an interest in the nature of language and consciousness into his verse, which is for him simply the form in which he writes his personal thoughts, opinions, and memories. He develops a fine sense of irony concerning the uses to which God is put in the social and political life of Spain.

Valverde was born on 26 January 1926 in Valencia de Alcántara, a few miles from the Portuguese border in the southwest of Spain, and spent his childhood in Madrid. His first discovery of...