Cernuda's Mirrors: the Poet's Relationship with Salinas in the light of His Collected Letters

Re-reading Luis Cernuda's Collected Letters with some of his poems and essays in mind provides a more complex picture of the poet and his relationship with Pedro Salinas than the one spread by the poet himself: along with his contempt, the fact that he still counted on him for a long time; along with his refusal to consider him as one of his earlier masters, his overt acknowledgement of this magisterial condition. It would be excesive to say that his experience around Perfil del aire, his first book of poems, set him for once and for all on his very personal path, but the truth is that some of his later leit motifs-rejection of "official" literature, building of his own literary posterity, bitterness against critics, erosion of the academic's authority-seems to find their first source in that episode of his biography, in the Seville of the 1920's.