In the summer of 1960, Cernuda moved back to the United States, invited by the University of California, Los Angeles. The visit was organized by Carlos-Peregrín Otero, a young scholar who had just submitted the first Ph.D. dissertation written about Cernuda’s poetical work. The stay was a good experience for Cernuda and he returned to writing poetry after a long period of inactivity. The poems dating from this period reflect Cermuda’s troubled relationship with his generation, as well as his disagreement with the values then defended in Spain by the promoters of social poetry. In these new verses, Cernuda made very clear his determination not to ever return to Spain.

Cernuda returned to California during 1961-1962, as visiting professor at San Francisco State College, and 1962-1963 as visiting professor at UCLA. Cernuda did not like his stay in Los Angeles, even tough he rented a nice little apartment on the beachfront, for he found the relationship with members of the Spanish Department unbearable. However, the publication of Desolación de la Quimera in the end of 1962, and a tribute in La Caña Gris, a Spanish periodical, gave him some comfort. Eventually, the gossip and intrigues, real or imagined, turned his UCLA experience into a nightmare. Cernuda returned to Coyoacán in June 1963, with the intention of going back to the States in September to teach at the University of Southern California (USC). However, he refused to undergo the medical check-up required for the renewal of his visa. He finally decided to resign the contract and remain in Mexico.

On the morning of November 5, 1963, Paloma Altolaguirre went up to Luis Cernuda’s room and found him dead on the floor. He had died of a heart attack. In the typewriter, there was a sheet with a footnote to a work he was writing about the Álvarez Quintero brothers.

He was buried the next day in the Panteón Jardín. On the day of his death, the first copies of Ocnos’ third edition arrived at his house. Only the second volume of Poesía y literatura remained unpublished and appeared in a posthumous edition in 1964.

Since the mid 1950s, young Spanish poets have begun to reclaim Cernuda's work. This esteem resulted in the 1955 publication of a first tribute organized by the group of poets Cántico: Ricardo Molina, Pablo García Baena and Vicente Nunez, among others. More important still was the tribute that the Valencia periodical La Caña Gris dedicated to him in 1962. Coordinated by Jacobo Muñoz, this tribute included the participation of several of the poets who, over time, would dominate the landscape of post-war Spanish poetry: José Angel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma and Francisco Brines, among others.

These tributes added to the growing interest that critics and scholars such as Carlos-Peregrín Otero, Elisabeth Müller, Philip Silver and Derek Harris showed about Cernuda's poetry. In 1964, Ínsula and the Revista Mexicana de Literatura dedicated monographs to him. Ever since, the poet's reputation has been steadily rising.

It is difficult to imagine what Cernuda, largely unknown during his lifetime, would have thought if he had read his continuous posthumous praise. With his misgivings about critics in general, he probably would have preferred to stay a little more outside the official celebrations. When writing, he was not addressing the public at large or the critics, let alone the country's cultural institutions, but the poet of the future. It was in the sensitivity and intelligence of that poet where he eventually hoped to find meaning to his own work.