Who is Miguel de Cervantes from Selected Poems and what is their importance?

Miguel de Cervantes appears in the poems, The Maker, the Self and the Other and The Limit. This Spanish writer, who gained fame for his windmill-charging fictional creation, Don Quixote, appears a number of times in these poems. Cervantes served in the Spanish army, and Borges imagines him dreaming up Don Quixote while on duty. He admires Cervantes for being both a poet and a man of action. Borges even goes so far as to give Don Quixote a life as real as that of Cervantes, as if Quixote were flesh and blood.