Las personas del verbo

*Las personas del verbo* collects the complete poetry of Jaime Gil de Biedma, a body of work that has helped modernize contemporary poetry by linking Spanish-language verse with the English poetic tradition of the dramatic monologue. This accounts, in part, for its remarkable distinctiveness. For, as Joan Ferraté noted long ago—in what remains one of the most lucid essays ever written on this poet—the subject matter of Gil de Biedma’s poetry is certainly not "the simple emotional jolt or the combination of emotions to whose verbal expansion our poets regularly surrender themselves; rather, it is always a complex of emotion and consciousness, of vision and attitude, of lived experience and judgment upon life—a complex in which, I insist, both opposing poles maintain the same distance from the poet’s self, whose private experience is defined in each instance by the terms of their specific opposition."