Poetry, it might be argued, has always inclined to Platonism or at least to Platonizing, and [Guillén's collection] Cántico acknowledges the proposition by opposing it, by affirming the value of living in the real world, by celebrating the experience of consciousness, that consciousness which, without experience, would not know that it existed. (p. 697)

Between the beginning of the book and the end are, in the complete Spanish original, 332 poems that celebrate the ordinary experiences of life, experiences that thus become extraordinary, experiences by definition—and faith—good—all the "normal" things that can be encountered in a day (and of course as long as one is awake, in a night). And since reality is what is, not what was or what may be, we have a rhetoric of the present, things in space more than actions in time, more nouns—far more—than verbs. Only the...