Though a renowned literary critic, essayist, university professor, translator, fiction writer, and dramatist, Pedro Salinas is best remembered as the eldest and most versatile member of the acclaimed "Generation of 1927," a group of poets who flourished in Spain from 1920 to 1936. The ultimate goal of the group was to renovate the poetical scene by fusing current European literary trends with Spain's literary heritage. In the 1920s that task was accomplished by poetry with complex images, metaphors, and synesthesia and by postulating a bias for a pure conceptual art lacking in emotional overtones--such as that espoused by the ultraists and French symbolists. The group of poets who idolized the Spanish baroque poet Luis de Góngora, regarded as an exponent of excessively ornate poetry, further provided the impetus for the creation of a "pure poetry" based on concrete reality and for the adaptation of classical and popular forms characteristic...