Antonio Reyes born in Icod el Alto (Realejos - Tenerife) in the year 1927.

Antonio Reyes writes his first verses towards 1945. He was studying fourth course of Baccalaureate and months ago he moved from Icod (Realejos), his native town to La Laguna. He was 18 years old.

Its liking to Literature is born with the friendship of a young boy - Belisario- brown, of low stature, of expressive eyes, writer occasionally and madly romantic. Reyes read almost all the poets of XIX Spanish century; also to diverse French writers. He feels special predilection by the literary work of Espronceda – he knows Canto to Teresa of memory - and makes of the rimas of Becquer a kind of intimate breviary. His verses of this first time are romantic. Verses written with certain facility. With absolute predominance of the form. Its expression is made skillful sometimes and its thematic is false. Perhaps these first moments of the poetic task of Reyes – inevitable for who begins to write in the romantic shadow - had to be silenced. But are those who give us the key of his personality. Because Antonio Reyes in a while of its life, when facing a poetic panorama until then totally unknown for him breaks his old molds, and freed of his false poetic and it initiates a entirely new way.

This change produces in Antonio Reyes a brake of spiritual values. He found of suddenly with a wide and unsuspected horizon. In this change he find himself. Its poetry becomes deeply human. Pulsate in her an intense existencial preoccupation.

Antonio also feels a great passion by the Theater. Both, like author and actor. He wrote several works, all of them unpublished. As actor is his uninterrupted presence in the TEU of the La Laguna. Few days before his death he interpreted the first paper of the drama of Gimenez Arnau, "Died fifteen years ago", released in the Guimerá theater of Santa Cruz de Tenerife; last performance of one releases series that begins in the small Theater of A.C.F. of the La Laguna.

His death - 27 years broken unexpectedly - arrived to the Island through a vulgar note of events: "infortunate young...", "displeased accident..." The Island however had lost a poet. A poet to whom he ignored. Its poetic recitals in the Ateneo and the House of the Student, its publications in "Nosotros" the university voice of the Islands. Nothing of that counted. Antonio Reyes was not "an official" poet. Perhaps because he never concurred to Floral Games.

Antonio will continue living with us, while we know him already eternally immovable, with the set look in last stars.

© Eliseo Izquierdo.