Juan Antonio Villacañas

Juan Antonio Villacañas (born 1922 in Toledo; died August 21, 2001) was a Spanish poet, essayist and critic. In 2015, he was named distinguished son ("hijo predilecto") of the city of Toledo.

However, from 2001 onwards, the number of poets and critics, both Spanish and foreign, that admire Villacañas' work increases. This revival, coming after the break of these decades of the twentieth century, shows once again, the importance of Juan Antonio Villacañas. Relevant in this respect are the appreciations of such poets and critics as Emilio Porta, Pablo Luque Pinilla, Roberto Carlos Hernández Ferro, Enrique Gracia and Michael Smith. In 2010, the annual book fair of Toledo was dedicated to Juan Antonio Villacañas. The opening speech was said by his daughter, Beatriz Villacañas

In 2000, he was proposed by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes y Ciencias Históricas de Toledo as a candidate for the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana.

Villacañas lived in Toledo throughout his life, remaining independent of groups and literary trends and following his own poetic and personal course. Such personal and artistic independence was to bring the toll of silence and neglect from the established groups and critical trends from the 1980s onwards.

In the latter, Villacañas exposes the fallacies underlying a great part of the predominant poetry criticism of that time. Poems, reviews, short stories and writings of different types can be found in such publications as ABC, Poesía Española (1ª y 2ª Épocas), Diario Ya, Poesía Hispánica, Diario de León, Le Journal des Poètes and El Mercurio de Chile. In the seventies, Juan Antonio Villacañas explores a new way of creating: the union of poem and image to construct a unity of significance that he called “liriforma”. An exhibition of these “liriformas” took place in the Palace of Benacazón in Toledo in 1976. These “liriformas” form together, a book called Testamento de Carnaval. Together with some other media, the periodical La Estafeta Literaria covered the news interviewing the author in the Nº 579, 1 January 1976.

In 1956, he was invited by the Belgian Academy of French language and literature to the III Biennale Internationale de Poésie de Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium). His close friendship with the Hispanicist and poet Edmond Vandercammen dates from this period. The latter reviewed his Conjugación Poética del Greco in Le Journal des Poètes (1959) and translated several of Juan Antonio’s poems into French, all appearing in the said Journal (1972). Following his stay in Belgium, he was interviewed at the UNESCO in Paris where his voice was recorded for a special broadcast for Spanish America. From the 1950s onwards, the work of Juan Antonio Villacañas begins to appear in both national and international poetry anthologies. At the same time, extracts from his poetic and critical works was to appear in different journals and newspapers.

Juan Antonio Villacañas wrote thirty three books of poetry, spanning a wealth of themes and forms, from free verse (as early as the 1950s) to the sonnet, from stanzas and rhymes of his own invention to the lira: Juan Antonio Villacañas infused this classical form with new and surprising content, so much so that his liras are now known as "Liras juanantonianas". To honour the mastery of Juan Antonio Villacañas regarding the lira, Juan Ruiz de Torres invented a new form deriving from this one, called decilira. In addition to poetry, he also produced an ample work of criticism and essays (these were to appear in a wide variety of publications as for instance La Estafeta Literaria y Nueva Estafeta, directed by Luis Rosales) and two prose books: Bécquer o la Poesía de Todos (awarded the Círculo de Escritores y Poetas Iberoamericanos de Nueva York prize in 1971) y Versómanos (1989).

Born in Toledo in 1922, the Civil War cut short his secondary education. Obligatory military service was carried out in places as different as Melilla and the Pyrenean Valley of Arán. In the former, he was placed in charge of the reorganisation of the Military Club library and he took advantage of the opportunity to develop an intense autodidactic process, reading avidly and widely. On returning to Toledo, he was employed by the Town Council where he was later to take charge of the area of Art and Culture, a post he held for many years. His book of poetry Los Sapos (1968) is an indictment of power and its abuses, where a Town Council is at the same time a reality and a metaphor of such power.