When Pedro Salinas’s 1933 collection of love poems, La voz a ti debida, was introduced to American audiences in Willis Barnstone’s 1975 English translation, it was widely regarded as the greatest sequence of love poems written by a man or a woman, in any language, in the twentieth century. Now, seventy-five years after its publication, the reputation of the poems and its multifaceted writer remains untarnished. A portrait of their era, the poems, from a writer in exile from his native civil war–torn Spain, now reemerge in our time. In this new, facing-page bilingual edition, Barnstone has added thirty-six poems written in the form of letters from Salinas to his great love, Katherine Whitmore. Discovered years later, these poems were written during and after the composition of La voz and, though disguised as prose, have all the rhythms and sounds of lineated lyric poetry. Taken together, the poems and letters are a history, a dramatic monologue, and a crushing and inevitable ending to the story of a man consumed by his love and his art. Bolstered by an elegant foreword by Salinas’s contemporary, the poet Jorge Guillén, and a masterly afterword by the Salinas scholar, Enric Bou, that considers the poet and his legacy for twenty-first century world poetry, Love Poems by Pedro Salinas will be cause for celebration throughout the world of verse and beyond.

"Woman and the Infinite demonstrates how Pedro Salinas's poetry and frequently overlooked narrative and theater reveal a preoccupation with the nature of time, especially extraordinary moments that transcend space and time. Many of these moments are intimately connected with the man-woman, yo-tu relationship. Salinas's exploration of this theme is best understood in the context of other modern literary evocations of epiphanic moments. Such literary phenomena as William Wordsworth's "spots of time" and James Joyce's "epiphanies" are among the precursors of Salinas's moments of eternity, as are moments of timelessness in works by Marcel Proust and the French Symbolist poets. Salinas's reception of the Symbolists was direct, but also refracted through his reading of the Latin American modernistas, especially Ruben Dario. In his well-known commentary on Dario, Salinas connects the perception of woman with a visionary moment of extraordinary lucidity, a connection found in his own works." "Woman is elusive for Salinas. She has a multiplicity of forms and varying identities that are expressed with mirrors and shadows or Classical and Biblical mythological archetypes. All of these are found in "Aurora de verdad" from Vispera del gozo, a narrative piece which can be read as representative of Salinas's work as a whole. Specific images in the story, including mirrored figures and references to mythological goddesses, are also key elements in a trajectory in Salinas's works in general toward an all-encompassing, absolute, and infinite moment."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The book offers an in-depth, critical appreciation of seven major Spanish poets. Emphasis is on the modern period, with five of the poets being twentieth-century poets. It is argued that the roots of modern poetry are to be found in Romanticism's anguished search for meaning. The seven Spanish poets include Becquer, Rosalia de Castro, Antonio Machado, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti.

The study assesses the degree of thematic unity present in the complete poetic works of Pedro Salinas. Chapter titles point up the erosion of distinctions between such categories as abstract and concrete reality, the metaphysical and the physical, absence and presence, and the processes of accumulation and elimination.

Brings together scholars in the social sciences from around the world, to address the question of how mind and culture are related through symbols

As he develops these images and themes, Salinas often includes self-conscious reflections on the nature of poetic expression, the battle against the blank page, the rage for order."--BOOK JACKET.