Jaime Gil de Biedma

Jaime Gil de Biedma, who is widely considered to be the most influential post Civil War Spanish poet (with Carlos Barral), was born in Barcelona in 1929 the same city where he died in 1990, although he had very deliberately stopped writing poetry some ten years before, insisting that the character he had invented, the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, as opposed to the respectable bourgeois businessman of the same name, had nothing left to say and he refused to go on playing the role of a poet in literary society. Among Spanish readers, he is more commonly considered one of the most consummate anglophiles in the field of contemporary peninsular literature. This Anglophilia was initiated when first read Eliot’s Four Quartets in translation in 1952, although previously he had been a considerable Francophile as befitted a young Spaniard of his elevated social class, bearing in mind that Spanish society had always been notoriously 'afrancesado' until well into the 20th century, a situation which would only begin to change precisely due to the influence of poets like Gil de Biedma and Luis Cernuda. His lifelong adherence to and assimilation of Anglo-American culture was consolidated by his studies in Oxford in 1953 where he read T.S. Eliot for the first time in English (along with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender), thus beginning a lifelong fascination with the work of the Anglo-American poet. Moreover, the long periods spent in the largely Anglophone circles of Manila would also contribute to his Anglophile literary sensibility and on numerous occasions he would declare England to be his 'segunda patria', his second country, and would also say that he was 'in great measure, a product of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition.'