SOURCE: Harris, Derek. “Luis Cernuda: Caves of Poisonous Lights.” In Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre, pp. 161-201. Fife, Scotland: La Sirena, 1998.

In the following essay, Harris chronicles the surrealist origins and “neoromantic” nature of Cernuda's poetry.

Luis Cernuda's earliest surviving poetry dates from 1924, the year of the First Surrealist Manifesto, but it was some time before any interest in or awareness of Surrealism makes itself felt in his work. His first collection of poems, Perfil del aire [Outline of the Air] is a slim volume of short, Symbolist style compositions written between 1924 and 1927. The book received some unfavourable reviews and was subsequently recast when it was incorporated into the first edition in 1936 of La Realidad y el Deseo, the unified title given to successive editions of his complete poems.¹ The evocation of the indistinct emotionalism of adolescence in...