During the revolutionary period, José Lezama Lima’s essay collections were published, entitled “La cantidad hechizada” (The Bewitched Quantity) in 1971 and “Imagen y posible” (Image and Possibility) in 1981, after the writer’s death. Both volumes contribute to clarifying the framework of his conceptions regarding poetry—literature in general—and its links with culture and reality in its historical development.

“The Bewitched Quantity” is a volume containing many of the essay pieces written by Lezama in the early years of the Revolution, including “The Historical Image” and “From Poetry,” from 1959 and 1960, respectively, in which his scope of inquiry expands toward a universal connection between poetry and history, beyond the borders drawn by the sea around the Island.

The so-called imaginary eras find here a space where a history of the world, which is also the history of its myths, converges. These are defined as establishments of the so-called “poetic realm,” upon which a plurality of elements and causalities converge, among which the presence of the human stands out, beings capable of uniting the real and the fabled for the birth of poetry. In this sense, today we can consider him one of these exceptional beings.

Rather than completely accepting these Lezamian concepts, it might be preferable to consider them as a mythology of the poetic, a further collection of images with which he sought to capture the inherent complexity of the poetic phenomenon in its causes and hazards, inaugurating rather than concluding the thematic space of a poetics of the poetic, if you will.

For its part, “Image and Possibility” includes many of the texts that José Lezama Lima published in Orígenes and others that he had conceived after the extinction of the magazine and during the years of the revolutionary process, as a posthumous tribute to an entire life dedicated to reconquering the paradise of poetry and projecting it toward its materialization in history.