SOURCE: Harris, Derek. Preface to The Poetry of Luis Cernuda, edited by Anthony Edkins and Derek Harris, pp. v-xviii. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Harris provides an overview of Cernuda's poetic development, with reference to the collection Reality and Desire and other titles.

Today Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is widely recognized as one of the major Spanish poets of this century, but only within the last decade has his work begun to receive the attention it deserves. He belonged to that brilliant group of poets, who include Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and Rafael Alberti, poets who came into prominence in the 1920s and were then caught up in the holocaust of the Spanish Civil War. While many of his contemporaries had won acclaim before the Civil War, Cernuda had had an uneasy time with the critics, and his exile...