Pedro Salinas (1891–1951)

Pedro Salinas was one of several modern Spanish poets who sustained themselves in exile with university teaching. After leaving Spain in 1936, Salinas had a distinguished career as a professor at Cambridge, the University of Puerto Rico, Wellesley, and Johns Hopkins University. While Salinas also wrote criticism, essays, drama, and fiction, he is remembered chiefly as a poet. Love is one of his principal subjects, and in To Live in Pronouns (1933), his love for a woman is transformed into the quest for spiritual love, which symbolizes his attempt to reconcile the interior and exterior worlds. Salinas regarded love as the power to create a stable inner reality as protection against the chaos of the world. In this treatment of love and his idealization of women he resembled Gustavo Adolfo Becquer and Juan Ramon Jimenez, two of his masters. In El Contemplado (Sea of Puerto Rico) (1946), he discovered peace through a contemplation of the waters of Puerto Rico. In his final volume, The Incredible Bomb (1950), he asserted faith in love against the destruction of the nuclear age. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from My Voice, Because of You… (lisätietoja)