This study places Valente and Carnero"s poetry in a socio-historical context, and discusses influences and antecedents in relations to doubt and loss of faith, but the main body of the work concentrates on the poetry itself. It follows the poetic process involved in translating world to word, discusses the kind of poetry which loss of belief in the efficacy of these processes makes inevitable, and examines how the poetry of both poets produces meaning through interaction with other texts.