José Lezama Lima’s essayistic work developed primarily before the triumph of the Revolution, harmoniously integrated into the rise and depth of the literary studies of the Orígenes group, which shed so much light on national tradition and also emerging values, in addition to works and authors from the international sphere located in the broad concentric circles of the magazine’s shock wave as a cultural phenomenon.

In addition to some texts included in the issues of the magazine Orígenes, Lezama also wrote the essay collections “Analecta del reloj” (Analecta of the Clock), 1953; “La expresión americana” (The American Expression), 1957; “Treaties in Havana”, 1958; and, already during the revolutionary period, although also containing earlier texts: “La cantidad hechizada” (The Bewitched Quantity), 1970; and “Imagen y posible” (Image and Possibility), published posthumously in 1981, through which a progression can be seen in his understanding of abstraction and poetic fact.

Implicit in Lezamian essays is the conception of continuous learning and writing as a phenomenon in which not only the level of knowledge achieved but also affective experiences, the being in its synergistic totality, converge, which is why he stated:

“I remember being asked years ago how long it took me to write an essay, and I answered 44 years, which was my age at the time. In reality, it takes you as many years as you have to write something.”

An important area of ​​his essay work is given by the gradual conception and embodiment of a poetic system of the world, in which he offers some keys to the study of his purely creative work, but he also studied the work of important poets of the language, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, about whom he published his first text, in 1937 in the magazine “Verbum”, under the title of “El secreto de Garcilaso” and would later publish similar analyses, also touched by his essential lyricism.

Regarding the poetic framework of the Cuban nation, Lezama, in addition to devoting himself to the study and sometimes hallucinatory contemplation of the works of his contemporaries, dealt with some threads that had contributed to shaping the great poetic framework of the nation, specifically José Martí, Julián del Casal and Juan Clemente Zenea, the latter at a later stage, as he once said, adding rings to the great enigma of his life.

One of José Lezama’s most important contributions—which other Origenist poets have also pointed to—is the definitive symbiosis between poetry and history, a perspective that he complements in the texts he published from 1959 onwards. His transcendent conception of poetry, embodied in his concrete poetic work, finds full expression in an essayistic work that is also of high caliber and a required reference for understanding the history of the genre on the Island.