Jaime Gil de Biedma

In addition to being one of the best Spanish poets of the 20^th century, Jaime Gil de Biedma was an extraordinary prose writer and a lucid, courageous literary critic. Under the title El pie de la letra, the poet himself published the first edition of his collected essays in 1980, in a sequence that actually comprised an intellectual autobiography. From his early years, through the formulation of the aesthetic programme on which he would base his own poetics, the journey continues into his mature years. He gradually stopped writing poetry, but continued to cultivate his literary criticism with risk and relish.

In his ever-memorable style, capable of addressing all areas of literary and life experience, Gil de Biedma studies masters such as Lord Byron, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda, and salutes contemporaries such as Carlos Barral, Claudio Rodríguez and Juan Marsé. He also describes the Barcelona nights of his time, remembers the years of his youth at Oxford, and recounts a visit to Picasso at his home in the south of France, never abandoning the motto he coined for himself: “He who reads for pleasure, read me not.”

In addition to the essays added to the second edition in 1994, this new definitive edition, annotated and extended by Andreu Jaume, includes a number of scattered texts, some of which have never been featured in a volume, others strictly unpublished. Together, these complete the works of an indispensable intellectual.