Luis Cernuda (born Luis Cernuda Bidón September 21 1902, Seville— November 1963, Mexico City), was a Spanish poet and literary critic.
The son of a military man, Cernuda received a strict education as a child, and then studied law at the University of Seville, where he met the poet and literature professor Pedro Salinas. In the 1920s, after his father died, Cernuda left his hometown, with which he had all his life an intense love-hatred relationship. He moved to Madrid, where he quickly became part of the literary scene. For a year, he worked as a reader at the University of Toulouse, returning to Spain after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. Cernuda collaborated with many organisations working to support a more liberal and tolerant Spain. He participated in the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia.
The central concerns of this poet are evident in the title of his life's major opus: La realidad y el deseo ("Reality and Desire"). He published his first collection of verse, Perfil del aire ("Air's profile"), in 1927. Several books followed, and he collected new and already published poetry under this title in 1936. Subsequent editions would include new poetry as new books inside La realidad y el deseo. Expanded on almost until his death in 1963, in this work the poet explores desire, love, subject, object, history and sexuality in poems which draw influences from romanticism, classicism, and the surrealist avant-garde. Besides verse, he also published a collection of reminiscent prose poems, 'Ocnos', about his childhood in Seville.
Cernuda is known as a member of the Generation of '27, a group of Spanish poets and artists including Federico Garcia Lorca. He broke new ground with Los Placeres Prohibidos ("Forbidden Pleasures"), an avant-garde work in which the poet used surrealism to explore his sexuality.
Deeply influenced by André Gide, Cernuda embraced his homosexuality at an early age and made homosexual desire and love the core of his poetry. Or, at least, unlike other gay poets at his time, in his poetry he was never ambiguous about the fact that the objects of his desire and love were men. One of the most influential poet in contemporary Spanish verse, he is definitely a crucial ground-breaking figure for homosexual writing in Spanish.
During the Spanish Civil War, Cernuda fled to England, where he began an exile that later took him to France, Scotland, Massachusetts (Mount Holyoke College), California and finally settling in Mexico; he never returned to Spain.
His major English language critics include Derek Harris and Phillip Silver.