Gabriel Celaya arrived on the literary scene before the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. Yet his fame stems mainly from his so-called social poetry of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the years of rebellion by the majority of Spanish intellectuals, who felt that they could no longer turn their backs on the social and political injustice that had prevailed since the end of the civil war. Celaya can serve as a paradigm of the evolution of twentieth-century Spanish poetry, since his work displays the influences of symbolism, romanticism, existentialism, surrealism, and experimentalism, in addition to social realism. The author of more than fifty books in less than fifty years, Celaya was, most importantly, a motivating force in the development of protest poetry in Spain. His influence on younger poets and dissident intellectuals in general during the Franco regime is essential for understanding the evolution of culture...