SOURCE: Curry, Richard K. “Between Platonism and Modernity: The Double ‘Fall’ in the Poetry of Luis Cernuda.” In The Word and the Mirror: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Luis Cernuda, edited by Salvador Jiménez-Fajardo, pp. 114-31. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Curry details how the self-conscious modernity of Cernuda's poetry conflicts with the Platonic ideal.

a dynamic semantic unit differs from a static one by virtue of the fact that it occurs as a gradually realized contexture

—Jan Mukarovsky, “On Poetic Language”

The whole of the poetic work of Luis Cernuda offers the reader a masterfully stylized and highly cohesive continuity of contexture. Some critical approaches to Cernuda's poetry attempt to explain this cohesiveness on the basis of the poet's biography, some aspect of his character, or his psychology. But this cohesiveness is present because the contextural continuity prevails over...