In December 1927, the Góngora tercentenary celebrations reached a climax with a series of poetry readings and lectures at the Arts Club of Seville by people such as García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, José Bergamín and others.

[2] The experience of living on his own in a foreign city led him to a crucial realisation about himself: his almost crippling shyness, his unhappiness in a family setting, his sense of isolation from the rest of humanity, had all been symptoms of a latent homosexuality which now manifested itself and which he accepted, in a spirit of defiance.

[2] He also contributed articles to radical journals such as Octubre, edited by Alberti and his wife María Teresa León,[13] which demonstrates his political commitment at that time, although there is no evidence that he formally joined the Communist Party.

[20] In 1935 at a salon hosted by Carlos Morla Lynch, a diplomat, diarist, amateur musician and closet homosexual working in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, Cernuda met an English poet called Stanley Richardson, nine years younger than him, who was making a brief visit to the country.

[42] Villena, writing in 1984, sees these poems as the result of the spread in the 1920s of the ideal of "pure poetry" as espoused by figures such as Valéry, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega y Gasset in his influential essay La deshumanización del arte.

[9] This small group of poems can be read as Cernuda's participation in the Góngora tercentenary celebrations - except that he chose to evoke the memories of Garcilaso's eclogues and Luis de León's odes possibly as a way to signal his individuality and his independence from fashion.

His essay included in Poesía y literatura shows that Cernuda considered him to be a kindred spirit; someone for whom poetry was a refuge or means of escape from the trials and difficulties of everyday life; someone who was always trying to find a way to gain access to a realm of harmony.

[74] "Scherzo para un elfo" and "Gaviotas en el parque" are just two of the explorations of this theme Stylistically, there is an increased concentration on clarity and simplicity of diction and his control over his means of expression is growing.

He wrote "Lázaro" while Chamberlain and Hitler were negotiating over Czechoslovakia, and the poem is written in a mood of melancholy calm, trying to express the disenchanted surprise that a dead man might feel on being brought back to life.

However, this collection does include "Por otros tulipanes amarillos" an elegy to his former lover Stanley Richardson dead in an air raid on London, which echoes an earlier tribute published in Invocaciones.

As usual, the major theme is that of the impossibility of finding happiness in a world where desire and reality diverge - cf "Hablando a Manona", "Luna llena en Semana Santa", or "Música cautiva".

He also read Browning and learned how to take a dramatic, historic or legendary situation and to project his own emotional state onto it, in order to achieve greater objectivity, as in poems such as "Lázaro", "Quetzalcóatl", "Silla del Rey", or "El César".

[106] One significant borrowing from Eliot is the title of his last collection of poetry, Desolación de la Quimera, which alludes to a line from "Burnt Norton"The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera in itself an allusion to a sermon by John Donne.

Reading some lines of poetry, hearing some notes of music, seeing an attractive person could be the external influence that led to a poem but what was important was to try to express the real, deep-lying poetic impulse, which was sometimes powerful enough to make him shiver or burst into tears.

Gebser himself, together with Roy Hewin Winstone, was compiling an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry translated into German and Cernuda tried to get him to exclude any poems by Guillén, Salinas or Dámaso Alonso, on the basis that they were teachers rather than poets.

[118] One prose poem, "Escrito en el agua" (Written in the water), was excluded from the second edition of Ocnos by the censors in Franco's Spain - presumably because it contains blasphemous ideas - "God does not exist."

[131] The collection shows just how extensive and deep his reading of English literature was, as it contains studies of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne and Hopkins.

They display the extraordinary range of his reading, covering authors as diverse as Galdós, Goethe, Hölderlin, Cervantes, Marvell, Browning, Yeats, Gide, Rilke, Ronald Firbank, Nerval, Dashiell Hammett, Reverdy, Valle-Inclán as well as figures more often found in his writings such as Eliot and Juan Ramón Jiménez.

In a poem called "Malentendu", included in Desolación de la Quimera, Cernuda launches a bitter attack on a man who, he claims, consistently misunderstood and ill-treated him, alluding specifically to that description.

In Desolación de la Quimera, he defends his dead friend from superficial, mistaken memories of "Manolito" the endearing man, held by people who have forgotten or never knew his rare gifts as a poet, in "Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario".

[178] On the other hand, he is definitely not attracted by the nationalistic themes that appear in Campos de Castilla, especially the poet's focus on Castile, which Cernuda sees as negating the essence of Machado's best poetry, which stems from his Andalusian nature.

[176] However, this is difficult to reconcile with a strand of Cernuda's own poetry, as exemplified by the first poem of the "Díptico español" from Desolación de la Quimera, which is a tirade of invective against Spain that would not seem out of place in Machado.

The early influence was decisively rejected and his essays identify all the stylistic elements that he cast off, such as the impressionistic symbolism,[185] hermeticism,[186] the fragmentation of his poems,[187] his inability to sustain a thought,[186] the lack of desire to go beyond the surface of things.

[192] For example, Gide included in the Morceaux Choisis the section of Les Caves du Vatican where Lafcadio Wluiki pushes Amédée Fleurissoire out of a moving train just from curiosity as to whether he can actually bring himself to do it - the original acte gratuit.

[200] In "La palabra edificante", Octavio Paz wrote "Gide gave him the courage to give things their proper names; the second book of his surrealist period is called Los placeres prohibidos (Forbidden Pleasures).

[202] It was clearly with a similar aim in mind that Cernuda set out writing Historial de un libro, to recount "the story of the personal events that lie behind the verses of La realidad y el deseo.

In his journals, he describes how there was a feeling of loosening the corsets and throwing off prudish morality, which is quite similar to the atmosphere of Cernuda's poem "Luna llena en Semana Santa" from Desolación de la Quimera.

[206] This tendency seems to have intensified during his brief stay in Madrid before going to Toulouse, where he assumed the pose of a man who frequents bars, drinks cocktails, affects English shirts, discussed in an article by Villena (La rebeldía del dandy en Luis Cernuda).

[210]In some way, however, the combination of his contact with the world, especially the atmosphere of Paris which he visited in the university vacations, the rebellious attitudes and thinking of the surrealists, the influence of Gide, and his pent-up fight against bourgeois tendencies coincided in the belated acceptance of his sexuality, as expressed finally in Un río, un amor.

[216] Even as late as 1962, it was possible for a critic to write "he is so accustomed by now to live surrounded only by the creations of his own mind - who obey him always and are much more easily controlled than people - that real company bothers him.