Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===US and Mexico===

Although he was happy in Mount Holyoke, at the end of the 1947-48 year, a student advised him not to stay there and he himself began to wonder whether it was a beneficial force on his poetry.<ref name="Cernuda655">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 655</ref>  In the summer of 1949 he paid his first visit to Mexico and was so impressed that Mount Holyoke began to seem irksome.  This can be seen in the collection of prose ''Variaciones sobre tema mexicano'', which he wrote in the winter of 1949-50.<ref name="Cernuda655"/>  He began to spend his summers in Mexico and in 1951, during a 6-month sabbatical, he met X (identified by Cernuda only as Salvador), the inspiration for "Poemas para un cuerpo", which he started to write at that time.<ref name="Cernuda656">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 656</ref>  This was probably the happiest period of his life.

[[File:UNAM Biblioteca Central.jpg|right|thumb|upright=1.75|The Central Library - University of Mexico.]]
Scarcely had he met X than his Mexican visa expired and he returned to the US via Cuba.  It became impossible for him to continue living in Mount Holyoke: the long winter months, the lack of sun, the snow all served to depress him.  On his return from vacation in 1952, he resigned from his post,<ref name="hispanicexile.bham.ac.uk"/> giving up a worthy position, a decent salary, and life in a friendly and welcoming country that offered him a comfortable and convenient lifestyle.  He had always had a restless temperament, a desire to travel to new places.  Only love had the power to overcome this need and make him feel at home in a place, to overcome his sense of isolation.  In this, there is perhaps a clue as to one of the reasons that he was attracted to the surrealists - the belief in the overwhelming power of love.  In addition, he always had a powerful attraction to beautiful young men.<ref name="Cernuda659">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 659</ref>  He also had a constant urge to go against the grain of any society in which he found himself.  This helped him not to fall into provincial ways during his youth in Seville, whose inhabitants thought they were living at the centre of the world rather than in a provincial capital.  It also helped to immunise him against the airs and graces of Madrid or any other place in which he lived.<ref name=Cernuda659 />

In November 1952, he settled in Mexico<ref name=Cernuda660>Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 660</ref>  with his old friends Concha Méndez and Altolaguirre<ref name=hispanicexile.bham.ac.uk />(although since they had separated in 1944 and later divorced, Cernuda actually stayed with Concha).  Between 1954 and 1960 he was a lecturer at the [[National Autonomous University of Mexico]].  In 1958, the third edition of ''La realidad y el deseo'' was published in Mexico. For this edition Cernuda wrote an essay ''Historial de un libro'' which considers his work in order ''to see not so much how I made my poems but rather, as Goethe said, how they made me''.<ref name=Cernuda660 />  In 1958, Altolaguirre died and Cernuda took on the job of editing his poetry.  His two sisters died in 1960.<ref name="Poesia completa" />

In June 1960, he lectured at [[UCLA]] and became friendly with Carlos Otero, who was presenting a doctoral thesis on Cernuda's poetry that year.  This stay seems to have revitalised Cernuda and, on his return to Mexico, he began to write poetry again.  The poems he wrote in the autumn and winter of 1960-61 form the nucleus of his final collection, ''Desolación de la Quimera'', which he completed in San Francisco a few months later.  From August 1961 to June 1962, he gave courses at [[San Francisco State College]].  After a brief return to Mexico, he made his third and final visit to California in September 1962, where he was a visiting professor at UCLA until June 1963.  He spent the summer of 1963 in Mexico and, although he had an invitation to lecture at the [[University of Southern California]], he declined it in August, because of the need to undergo a medical in order to extend his visa.  He died in Concha Mėndez's house of a heart attack on November 5, 1963.  He was buried in the [[Panteón Jardín]], in Mexico City.<ref name="Poesia completa" />   He never married and had no children.