Modernist poet from Gran Canaria, pseudonym of Rafael Romero. He founded the magazine "La Rosa de los Vientos" and renewed Canarian poetry.
Alonso Quesada was the pseudonym of Rafael Romero Quesada, born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1886. The port city, with its cosmopolitan mix of English travellers, merchants and sailors, imbued his sensibility: his poetry is full of Atlantic mists, steam chimneys and harbour melancholies. He studied at the English school in Las Palmas and worked as a shop clerk, a grey life that contrasted with the richness of his inner world.
He was the cultural animator of his generation in Gran Canaria. He founded the magazine La Rosa de los Vientos (1916), which for years was the main forum of modern Canarian poetry. He corresponded with Unamuno and was friends with other writers from mainland Spain and Latin America. His main work, El lino de los sueños (1915), inaugurated a form of introspective, mildly pessimistic modernism that broke with the grandiloquent rhetoric of the fin de siècle.
Quesada died young, in 1925, aged barely thirty-eight, a victim of tuberculosis. He left a relatively brief but extraordinarily dense body of poetic work. He was rediscovered by the generation of '27, which recognised him as a precursor. Today his books are available in critical editions and his figure is a reference point in studies of Canarian literature. The public library of Las Palmas bears his name.