Miguel de Unamuno was such an important public figure and intellectual mentor in Spain during the first third of the twentieth century that his fame as a polemical essayist and philosopher overshadowed his poetry during his lifetime, and since his death his reputation has also depended more on his prose works than on his verse. He is known as a religious thinker, a philosopher who is only marginal to the main stream of Western thought, or, to students of Spanish, a writer of paradoxical novels and essays. Yet Unamuno thought of himself always as a poet, and because he valued feeling over reason and the individual over society, everything he wrote features an unsystematic and poetic use of language to express psychological and emotional dilemmas, self-contradictory thoughts, and sudden insights. When his poetry first appeared, it was criticized for being weighed down with intellectual arguments, but now the...