Havana, August 10(RHC)-- The Havana-based Casa del Alba Cultural remembered Cuban writer and poet José Lezama Lima on the 45th anniversary of his death –marked on August 9th.

The institution praised Lezama Lima’s vast literary work, noting that his baroque writing style and eclectic erudition profoundly influenced other Caribbean and Latin American writers.

Lezama Lima’s first published work, the long poem "Muerte de Narciso," brought him national acclaim at the age of twenty-seven and established his well-wrought style and classical subject matter.

Other poems included ‘Enemigo rumor’ (1941), ‘Aventuras sigilosas’ (1945), ‘La fijeza’ (1949), ‘Dador’ (1960) and ‘Fragmentos a su imán’ (1978).

Mexico’s Esténtor publishing house highlighted Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso (from 1966), considered to be his masterpiece and one of his few works to be translated into English during his lifetime.

In addition to his poems and novels, Lezama wrote many essays on figures of world literature such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Valéry, Góngora and Rimbaud as well as on Latin American baroque aesthetics. Most notably the essays published as ‘La Expresión Americana’ lay out his vision of the European baroque, its relation to the classical, and the American baroque.

Lezama Lima died in 1976 at age 65 and was buried at Colon Cemetery, in Havana. He was influential for Cuban and Puerto Rican writers of his generation and the next, such as Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Velázquez Medina, René Marqués, and Giannina Braschi, who depict his life and works in their writing.