Luis Cernuda

1902 –
1963
Read poems by this poet

Luis Cernuda y Bidón, a member of the Generation of 1927 movement, was born on September 21, 1902, in Seville, Spain. From 1920 to 1924, he was enrolled in military service while attending law school at the University of Seville, where he met the poet Pedro Salinas, while attending the latter’s classes on Spanish language and literature. Salinas introduced Cernuda to modern French poetry, particularly the work of André Gide. In 1926, Cernuda earned his law degree. He began publishing poems around the time he graduated from law school. He read some of his work during the tercentenary of Luis de Góngora, an event that was pivotal to the formation of the Generation of 1927. While at the event, Cernuda met and befriended Federico García Lorca. The following year, he obtained a lectureship in Spanish language and literature at the University of Toulouse but returned to Madrid in 1929 and worked in a bookstore. 

Cernuda enlisted in the Alpine Battalion, a Communist and Socialist militia, during the Spanish Civil War. He then moved to Valencia in 1937 and joined the second Congress of antifascist intellectuals. While there, he also cofounded the magazine Hora de España with several other writers. Cernuda left Spain in 1938 and became a lecturer in the United Kingdom. He remained there after the collapse of the Spanish republic in 1939 and met the writer Rafael Martínez, another friend of Lorca’s and, later, a scholar of Cernuda’s work. 

Cernuda’s collections of poetry include La realidad y el deseo [Reality and Desire] (Tezontle, 1964), his complete collected works; Donde habite el olvido [Where Oblivion Lies] (Signo, 1934); Los placeres prohibidos [Forbidden Pleasures] (1931), first published in Málaga by the Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27; and Perfil del aire [Profile of the Air] (Imprenta Sur), his first poetry collection, published in 1927. An English-language version of Cernuda’s collected works was released in 1971, titled The Poetry of Luis Cernuda (New York University Press), edited by Anthony Edkins and Derek Harris. Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda, edited by Reginald Gibbons, was first published in 1977 by the University of California Press then rereleased in 1990 by The Sheep Meadow Press with an introduction by Octavio Paz. 

From 1947 to 1952, Cernuda taught at Mount Holyoke College. In 1952, he settled in Mexico, where he continued to teach and write. While there, he released his final volume of poetry Desolación de la quimera: La realidad y el deseo, XI, 1956–1962 [Desolation of the Chimera], a collection of work written between 1950 and 1962 and rereleased in 2009 by White Pine Press. The latter collection was translated by Stephen Kessler.

Cernuda was also the author of eight prose works published both during his lifetime and posthumously, including Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea [Studies on Contemporary Spanish Poetry] (Edic. Guadarrama), first published in Madrid in 1957 and rereleased in 1975.

Cernuda died in Mexico City on November 5, 1963.