En Un Rio, un Amor domina un profundo sentimiento de desengano ante lo que aparenta ser una experiencia erotica desastrosa. En Los Placeres Prohibidos la amargura de la experiencia amorosa fracasada se transforma en una actitud mas elegiaca. La tematica de ambos libros es sumamente romantica: la expresion del individuo aislado acosado por sus propias emociones violentadas en un mundo hostil a sus suenos y deseos, en una realidad vislumbrada, pero inaccesible.

La lirica de Cernuda se presenta como expresion tragica de los dos polos que acotan el mundo del poeta: el deseo, siempre insatisfecho, de union con lo bello y puro, y la mediocre realidad que le rodea, Su poesia, elegante y serena, alcanza una hondura excepcional.

While Cernuda's verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life's journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity; the poet doesn't set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. But is it truly ours, this life we live?"

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain's Generation of 1927, which included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Guillen.