SOURCE: Bruton, Kevin J. “Luis Cernuda's Exile Poetry and Coleridge's Theory of Imagination.” Comparative Literature Studies 21, no. 4 (winter 1984): 383-95.

In the following essay, Bruton studies the influence of the English Romantics on Cernuda's later exile poetry.

The tendency among critics of Luis Cernuda's eleven-volume collection of a lifetime's poetic output, La realidad y el deseo,¹ spanning the years 1924-62, has been, almost without exception, to direct attention toward three major aspects of the poetry: first, Cernuda's embrace of Symbolist ideas in the early period up to 1928; second, the middle period of 1929-33 dominated by the poet's absorption of Surrealism; and third, the later work of an exile that became permanent from 1938 onward. This last period, the poetry of exile, has, in my opinion, been unjustly neglected by critics perhaps understandably drawn toward the more clearcut manifestations of Symbolism and Surrealism in Cernuda's earlier verse. An extreme example of...