20th-Century Spanish Poetry and Theater: An Overview
20th-Century Spanish Poetry and Theater
Poetry 40: Rooted
Poets aligned with the Franco regime’s ideology and aesthetics. Works: Journal of the Heap and Garcilaso. Author: Miguel Hernandez.
Uprooted
Poets who remained silent, awaiting better times to express their pain. Works: Shadow of Paradise and Anger. Authors: Vicente Aleixandre and Damaso Alonso.
Poetry 40: Socially Conscious
Poets believed poetry should be a means to change society. They focused on social issues, especially disparities. Topics: Alienation, dehumanization, desire for peace, political commitment. Style: Simple language, close to colloquial speech, for clear communication. Poets: Blas de Otero, Gabriel Celaya, and José Hierro.
Poetry 60: Intimacy and Individual Experience
Writers focused on intimacy and individual experience. Topics: Friendship, love, teenage years, children, work, everyday life. Style: Personal, using humor and irony, creating an intimate conversation with the reader. Poets: Angel Gonzalez, Jose Agustin, Jaime Gil, Rodriguez.
Poetry 70: Novísimos
Anthology: Novísimos Spanish. Trend: Marked change from previous poetry, rejecting realism and introducing new experiments (collages). Themes: Cultural exhibition. Style: Exotic, rhythmic language, careful vocabulary. Poets: Manuel Vazquez, Felix de Azua, Leopoldo María Panero.
Last Years
Events curbed experimentalism and shifted towards personal poetry. Many young poets emerged with less interest in avant-garde. Topics: Varied and disparate poetic styles. Poets: Blanca Andreu, Luis García Montero, and Felipe Benitez Reyes.
20th-Century Spanish Theater
Theater 40
Trends: Bourgeois Comedy
Defense of conservative values, sometimes with slight, tolerable criticism. Intrigue-based, dialogue-driven. Teatro Comico: Surreal, illogical, and corrosive humor.
Features
Poor outlook after the war. Theaters filled with escapist performances (sketches, variety shows) for the bourgeois public. Historical works propagated the victors’ political ideology. Authors: Calvo Sotelo and Joaquin Neville.
Theater 50
Topics
Emergence of engaged theater reflecting social injustices and inequalities: workers’ living conditions, economic and moral misery, political repression. Style: Realism, mimicking everyday spaces and language of different social classes. Many works remained unpublished due to censorship.
Story of a Staircase
Act 1
Economic problems of the neighborhood (except Don Manuel), character introductions, and Fernando and Carmina’s encounter and future plans.
Act 2
10 years later, things have changed, people have died or married, and the environment worsens, leading to anger.
Act 3
20 years later, characters accept aging and death, new neighbors complain and despise the former ones due to social class.
Theater 60
General Features
- Collective creation: No individual author.
- Less importance of text: Focus on physical expression, dance, music.
- Breaking stage conventions: New formulas for stage space, audience participation.
Contemporary Theater
Mixed panorama, predominantly commercial and institutional theater.
Institutional Theater Companies
Institutions like the National Drama Center and National Theater Company perform classical plays with spectacular stagings.
Commercial Theater
: continuous trends of bourgeois comedy or theater umor and continues to reap success. The success of the individual author: antonio gala as, Fernando Fernan Gomez k write realistic plays. The abundance of theater groups: k survive in difficult conditions represented in theatrical works pekeñas pekeñas with unknown authors.