The later poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade shares with other literary efforts of our time the anguished conviction that solitude is the ultimate reality of man's existence, but it is not dominated, as is so much contemporary literature, by a sense of despair or frustration. On the contrary, his poetry arouses in the reader a curiously mild regret at the human predicament, and, at the same time, a calm, resigned optimism. Carrera does not achieve his effect by merely juxtaposing contradictory ideas or attitudes; instead, he fuses disparate elements so as to transmute the components into a new and unified whole.