José María Valverde

José María Valverde Pacheco (26 January 1926, Valencia de Alcántara (Cáceres) - 6 June 1996, Barcelona) was a Spanish poet, essayist, literary critic, philosophy historian, and Spanish translator.

Valverde was born in Extremadura, but spent his childhood and teenage years in Madrid. While still a student at the Instituto Ramiro de Maeztu he published his first book, Man of God: Psalms, elegies and prayers, which was funded by the Institute. Although Damaso Alonso tempted him to study philology, Valverde pursued Philosophy; his doctorate included a thesis on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language. That same year he married Pilar Gefaell, with whom he had five children, including Mariana Valverde, a Professor of Criminology at the University of Toronto.

He wrote in various magazines: La Estafeta Literaria, Escorial, Works and Days, Root, and the Ensign and Journal of Aesthetic Ideas, at times using the pseudonym "Gambrinus". His essays were later collected in The Art of the Article (1949–1993) (Barcelona, 1994). He also published in poetic magazines including Garcilaso, Espadaña, Proel. Between 1950 and 1955, Valverde lived in Rome, where he was reader of Spanish at Sapienza University of Rome and at the Spanish Institute, and met Benedetto Croce. At age 29 in 1956, he obtained the chair of Aesthetics at the University of Barcelona. This setting and his experiences as a professor inspired "The conquest of the world" (1960). He participated in the literary magazines of the time and in numerous periodicals, which published much of his thinking. He himself said he was a poet rather than a philosopher, and not vice versa. He was devoted to the study of history of ideas. Collaborating with Martí de Riquer i Morera in an ambitious History of literature (1957, greatly expanded later) and writing a Life and death of ideas: small stories thoughts (1981), he launched his award-winning translations of classics of literature in English and German. With a clear social and political commitment, Christian and anti-Franco, he supported the popular cause in Central America (Cuba, the Sandinistas: relating to exiled Nicaraguan poets Julio Ycaza, Luis Rocha and Fernando Silva.) For political reasons (solidarity with teachers Enrique Tierno Galván, José Luis Aranguren and Agustin Garcia Calvo who were expelled from the University of Madrid by Franco), he resigned his professorship in 1964 and went into exile. He is credited with the now famous phrase, written on the blackboard in farewell: "Nulla aesthetica sine ethica. Ergo apaga y vámonos." He went to the United States, where he was professor of Hispanic and comparative literature (University of Virginia, McMaster) and then to Canada where he was a professor of Spanish literature at Trent University. This experience is part of his poem "The Tower of Babel falls on the poet":

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