Rosa Chacel is a major Spanish intellectual. She was born Rosa Clotilde Cecilia María del Carmen Chacel in Valladolid on 3 June 1898. In the autobiography about her first ten years of life, Desde el amanecer (Since Dawn, 1972), she writes of her pride in having been born in the watershed year for a generation of important Spanish writers. Her own literary generation is primarily that of 1927, to whose members she has dedicated many poems.

Her poetry is a significant testimony to that generation's link to the forms and themes of Spanish Golden Age poetry and is an integral element of her multigeneric, often autobiographical literary output. All her books, written during a career that spans more than sixty years, also show her erotic aesthetics.

Though her novels have been grouped with other literature written in exile, Chacel's poetry is peninsular Spanish in origin and spirit. Her first book...