José Lezama Lima

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José Lezama Lima (December 19, 1910-August 8, 1976) was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature. Born in the Columbia Military Encampment close to Havana in the city of Marianao where his father was a colonel, Lezama lived through the most turbulent times of Cuba's history, fighting first against the Machado dictatorship, and later surviving the Castro regime. His literary output includes the baroque novel Paradiso (1966), several anthologies of Cuban poetry and the magazines Verbum and Orígenes, presiding as the patriarch of Cuban letters for most of his later years.

Although he only left Cuba on at most two occasions (one trip to Jamaica and a possible trip to Mexico), Lezama's poetry, essays and two novels draw images and ideas from nearly all of the world's cultures and from all historical time periods. The baroque style that he forged relied equally upon his Góngora-influenced syntax and stunning constellations of unlikely images. Lezama Lima's first published work, a long poem called "Muerte de Narciso," released when he was only twenty-seven, made him immediately famous within Cuba and established Lezama's well-wrought style and classical subject matter.

In addition to his poems and novels, Lezama wrote many essays on figures of world literature like Mallarmé, Valéry, Góngora and Rimbaud as well as on Latin American baroque asethetics. Most notably the essays published as La expresión americana lay out his vision of the European baroque, its relation to the classical, and of the American baroque.

José Lezama Lima died in 1976 at age 65 and was buried in the Colon Cemetery, Havana. He was influential on Cuban writers of his generation and the next, such as Virgilio Piñera and Reinaldo Arenas, both of whom depict his life and death in their writing.