Resumen:
In his Complete Poetical Works, La realidad y el deseo, Luis Cernuda very often pursued polemics or homage. Among those who became the victims of his attacks were Juan Ramon Jimenez, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, Damaso Alonso and critics and scholars in general. Among those on whom he bestowed his homage were Federico Garcia Lorca, Mariano Jose de Larra, Andre Gide, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Goethe. In both cases the poet betrayed his determination to build an alternative canon, different from the official literary system. 'Un contemporaneo' is perhaps the piece in which both lines of his argument coincide, and in which Cernuda ironically anticipates his own homage and blames contemporary criticism for its blindness, under the same logics he had used in his poems dedicated to Lorca, Larra, Gide, etc., i.e., the glorification of the poet as a literary hero.
