No one better than Luis Cernuda himself to come up with a title that summed up not only his entire body of work, but also his life: reality and desire.
The work saw the light of day in the spring of 1936, when Cernuda compiled his verses in the first version of ‘La realidad y el deseo.’
The same title would successively embrace new waves of poems until the final edition published a year before his death in Mexico in 1963. Luis Cernuda was born on September 21, 1902, in Seville, into a very traditional and bourgeois home that soon proved suffocating for the child. One event marked him as a child: the transfer of Bécquer's remains to his city.
In 1925, he met Juan Ramón Jiménez. He was about to finish his not very brilliant university career and was confused and indecisive. His desires leaned him toward literature, and reality was not far from those paths: in 1927, he met Lorca and Vicente Aleixandre.
