20th Century Spanish Poets: Styles, Works, and Themes
20th Century Spanish Poets
Jorge Guillén
Works: Collected under the title Our Air:
- Song: Guillén’s main work, encompassing over 30 years of political poetry. It celebrates the joy of life, eclipsing pain and nostalgia.
- Clamor: Comprised of Maremagnum, That Will Give the Sea, and At the Height of the Circumstances. Reflects the miseries and sorrows surrounding the poet, including injustice, oppression, war, and exile.
Style: Elaborate expression, all lines capitalized, classical short meters (tenth stanzas, ballads, sonnets).
Gerardo Diego
The only poet aligned with the Franco regime.
Works: Two distinct styles:
- Traditional: Classical forms like sonnets and romances (e.g., Human Verses).
- Avant-Garde: Free verse, absence of punctuation and graphic resources (e.g., Picture, Manual of Foam).
Style: Wide range of themes (love, nature, music, religion), mastery of both avant-garde and traditional forms.
Vicente Aleixandre
1977 Nobel Prize winner. Main theme: fusion of man and nature.
Works:
- Surrealist Stage: The Destruction of Love (love and death as means of destruction and fusion with nature), Shadow of Paradise (lost paradise).
- Second Stage: Focus on human beings and their world, especially the passage of life (e.g., History of Heart).
- Third Stage: Meditations on life, revisiting surrealist techniques.
Style: Innovative metaphors, parallelism, anaphora, free verse.
Rafael Alberti
Works:
- Neo-popular Stage (1924-1926): Sailor on Earth (National Poetry Prize winner, popular metrics, longing for the sea).
- Neo-Gongora Stage (1926-1929).
- Surrealist Stage (1929-1930): About Angels (spiritual conflict, love, anger, failure, surrealist techniques).
- Social and Political Poetry (1930-1940).
- Exile Poetry (1941-1977): The Street Poet (revolutionary poetry).
Style: Variety of styles and subjects, anaphora, figures of meaning, color shades, free verse, surreal images.
Federico García Lorca
Works: Dominant themes: death and love as unavoidable frustrations.
- Youth Stage (1921-1928): Modernist and popular tendencies, surrealist influence, Andalusian poetry, neo-folklore. Gypsy Ballads (18 romances, Gypsies as pure beings).
- Surrealist Maturity Stage (1929-1936): Opposition to dehumanization. Poet in New York (dreamlike view, man as victim of his creation). Sonnets of Dark Love (posthumously published, unfinished love experience).
Style: Mastery of creative technique, fusion of religious and popular elements, symbolism, original rhythm and musicality, romances, choruses, classic verses.
Luis Cernuda
: Works: the work is marked by excessive sensitivity and because of his homosexuality that explains their isolation and defiance. The themes are loneliness, frustration, the eternal child, the desire for beauty, death and love as supreme and painful experience. His work has 2 stages: 1 e. Seville to 28 or years of apprenticeship or pure poetry. 2 º e. Madrid youth or surreal or from 29 to 38: “Forbidden Pleasures” influenced by surrealism, it is attached to the feelings of love, loneliness and emptiness, the author confronts the world with the choice of a forbidden love and not accepted, expresses her rebellion against social conventions and claimed his homosexuality. “Donde habite el olvido”: The title comes from a verse of Becquer and is a neo-romantic book. The poems “The reality and desire” is considered his spiritual biography, since it includes the previous books. 3 º e. in exile or maturity: it expresses the poet’s angst, as well as a deep disappointment and nostalgia because of their personal situation. “Desolation of the Chimera.” The poet speaks of his bitterness and memories. STYLE: expressed his dissatisfaction in his life, the inability to achieve their dreams due to misunderstanding of a skeptical and conservative society, dominated by love co joyful or painful experience, childhood, loneliness, the inexorable passage of time and nature in search of perfect beauty, avoid sharp rhymes, use free verse, combined with traditional verses like Guillen made all his verses be capitalized