The Life of the Fields: Las cosas del campo

Munoz Rojas, Jose Antonio: - Munoz Rojas (1909-2009) is one of the finest but least known poets of his generation. He was an Anglophile with a very considerable knowledge of English literature. He translated Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Eliot and others. In 1936 he was in Cambridge beginning a thesis on the relationship between the English 'metaphysical' poets and those of the Spain's 'golden age'. These studies were interrupted by the Spanish Civil War which began that summer. His Cambridge connections and the part they played in his near-death experiences in the first months of the war are recounted in his memoir 'La Gran Musarana', published in 1994. As well as 'Las cosas del campo', two books of poetry by Munoz Rojas are especially celebrated, 'Cantos a Rosa', 1954, love songs of lyrical and intricate form; and 'Objetos perdidos', 1997, a book of discreet humour about the trials of old age and religious devotion for which he received Spain's National Poetry Prize. In the post-war years Muñoz Rojas worked for the Banco Urquijo in Madrid. In those difficult years he helped many poets whether or not they were in favour with the Franco regime.