A career diplomat (ambassador to
Paris and to New Delhi), he has been perhaps the greatest Spanish-language poet.
He befriended the Surrealists, notably André Breton and Benjamin Perret who was to
translate "Sun Stone".He studied the great
amerindian and oriental sacred myths in the course of many stays in India and Japan.
He symbolizes in his life and work the fusion, the synthesis of extremes :
- the cultures of America, Europe and Asia ,
- Surrealism, synesthesia in Rimbaud's poems (colored vowels),
- Hispanic catholic imprint (Therese of Avila)
- Oriental Spirituality: Bouddhism and especially Tantrism that illuminates
his search.
He implies to us that passion can be both an illusion and a liberation.
"All wound is pregnant" : it is from his personal wound that the poet is going
to make surge the waters of life.
He expresses in his masterpiece "Sun Stone", a power
coming from the guts but channeled by the spirit, an erotic communion and loving ecstasy
reaching a spiritual dimension.
All his work reveals a "symbolist sensitivity", a will
of harmonization and sublime transparency, a return to the lost unity of man with Nature,
the body and the spirit, ego and the other.
In that, he is a precursor of "third millennium values"
; his work becomes universal, planetary.
