Dulce Maria Loynaz was one of Cuba's best-known poets. A lifelong writer, Loynaz finally achieved recognition during the last decades of her life, including the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary award, the Miguel de Cervantes Award. Her late recognition was in many ways the result of her own desire to stay out of the limelight.
Background
Loynaz was born in Havana on December 10,1902, into a well-to-do family who lived in a colonial-style mansion overlooking the sea with art, antiques, and all the trappings of affluence. Her father, Enrique Loynaz, a war hero, had fought in the Spanish-American War and was the author of the "Himno Invasor," the na-tional song of Cuba's rebel troops. Loynaz and her younger siblings, a sister and two brothers, were tutored at home. Loynaz's mother, an able artist and musician, encouraged her children to write, paint, and learn several languages. The Loynaz family home was frequently a calling place for writers visiting Cuba, such as Spain's Federico Garcia Lorca and Chile's Gabriela Mistral, who became Loynaz's lifetime friend.
Education
So comprehensive was her home schooling that she was admitted to the University of Havana, where she completed her law degree in 1927.
Career
Although she had been publishing some of her poetry in the Havana newspaper La Nación since 1919, it wasn't until 1938 that Versos, her first three-volume collection of poetry, was formally published .
Loynaz traveled extensively, and some of her work was published well after she wrote it. She visited the United States during the early 1920s and the Middle East in 1929. After seeing the Egyptian tombs she wrote the acclaimed Love Letter to King Tut-Ank-Amen, which was published in 1953. It was also during this time, between 1928 and 1935, that she wrote her only novel, the seminal work Jardín, which was published in Spain many years later and was described in her obituary as "a fine, difficult novel about the position of women in the modern world although it had been written 20 years earlier".
While still in her early twenties, and against her parents' wishes, Loynaz fell in love with Canary Islander Pablo Alvarez de Canas, whom she was forced to leave to enter into a loveless marriage with her first cousin Enrique in 1937. Except for the 1938 publication of Versos, that six-year period of her first marriage was uneventful. It wasn't until her divorce and her 1946 return and marriage to de Canas that she began to travel and write, publishing most of her subsequent works in Spain. During the 1940s and 1950s, she published several collections of poems, including Juegos de Agua (Fountains; 1946), Poemas sin nombre (Poems Without a Name; 1953), and Obra lírica (Lyrical Work; 1955). "Poema CXXIV," which appeared in her 1953 volume of poetry Poemas náufragos (Shipwreck Poems), is considered one of the most eloquent poems written about Cuba. Tenerife, a travel book based on her visits to the Canary Islands, was published in 1958. Throughout these years, she had also continued to practice law when in Cuba.
Politics
The Cuban revolution of 1959 and the period following brought an end to Loynaz's creative activity. Although she did not consider herself a political activist, she considered herself a self-exile in her own country, and vowed never to publish her work in Cuba again. She abandoned her legal practice and stopped writing poetry, unwilling to include communist themes in her work. However, that year she became a member and later served as president of Academia Cubana de la lengua (Cuban Academy of Language). She also wrote for journals, translated the works of Walt Whitman, a poet she greatly admired, and continued to write essays devoted to Spanish American women poets.
In 1968, she was appointed a member of Spain's prestigious Real Academia Española de la lengua (Spanish Royal Academy of Language), guardian of the Spanish language in the world. Throughout her life, even when she ceased her creative activity, her house was a meeting place for other Cubans artists and writers like Alejo Carpentier Valmont and Nicolas Guillén, both of whom she considered great friends.