Quote by Dulce María Loynaz: “Poetry is what remains when everything has been said.”

Ordinary language exhausts itself trying to explain, describe, and argue. Poetry is what is left when all of that has been stripped away — the irreducible something that cannot be paraphrased or summarized, the essence that only the compressed, musical power of verse can carry.

Loynaz published this view of poetry during the final turbulent year of Batista's Cuba, just before the 1959 revolution that would transform Cuban society. She lived in almost complete voluntary seclusion, a posture that would define her relationship to political upheaval in Cuba for decades.

Cuban poet and novelist awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1992, often called the greatest Cuban poet of the twentieth century. Her surrealist and symbolist poetry explored love, solitude, and the natural world, and she wrote much of her major work in near-isolation during the Cuban Republic era.