Generation of ’27: A Deep Dive into Spanish Poetry
The Generation of ’27
Evolution in Three Stages
First Stage (To 1927)
Influence of the avant-garde and pure poetry.
- Desire for formal perfection and a renewed interest in the classics.
Second Stage (1927–Spanish Civil War)
A re-humanization of poetry, influenced by surrealism.
- Return to eternal human feelings: love, desire, frustration, and existential concerns.
- Open political stances and commitments.
Third Stage (Post-Civil War)
- Lorca’s death and the exile of many poets, except Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, and Vicente Aleixandre.
Key Authors and Their Works
Pedro Salinas
First Stage
- Art and pure poetry.
Second Stage
- Love as the central theme.
- The Voice You Should: A story of passion, from initial connection to eventual heartbreak, exploring the complexities of love.
Third Stage
- Poems of exile, focusing on the external world and expressing solidarity with human suffering.
Jorge Guillén
His work revolves around three core themes: Song, Clamor, and Tribute. His poetry celebrates the cosmos with vital optimism, finding earthly paradise in this life.
- Seeks balance and moderates emotion.
- Employs classical metrics like sonnets and décima, favoring assonant and rhymed heptasyllabic quatrains.
Gerardo Diego
His work is characterized by thematic variety, focusing on the world around him: emotions, experiences, friends, and landscapes.
Early Works
- Modernist influence.
Creationist Period
- Experimental imagery, irrationality, lack of punctuation, short phrases, and absence of rhyme.
Period of Tradition and Modernity
- Traditional approaches inspired by Góngora, using classical verse, mythology, and elaborate syntax.
Human Poetry
- Addresses themes of love, religion, and landscapes using traditional forms.
- Describes immediate reality, incorporating personal experiences and autobiographical elements.
- Lark of Truth: His most important work in this stage.
Dámaso Alonso
Though his most significant work falls outside the Generation of ’27, he is associated with the group.
- Sons of Wrath (1941): Expresses the poet’s anguish, protesting against loneliness, hatred, and injustice, while empathizing with existential human problems. Employs grotesque imagery, prosaic language, and an expressive tone.
Vicente Aleixandre
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977.
Early work reveals a desire to merge with nature, defending its authenticity and spontaneity while criticizing social obstacles.
- Espadas como labios and Destruction or Love: Express the surrealist idea that love’s essence lies in the lover’s destruction to merge with the beloved. Features free verse, extensive lists, and a collection of images and metaphors.
Federico García Lorca
Lorca’s work encompasses poetry, prose, and drama.
Lyrical Themes
- Marginalized figures: Roma people and, later, Black individuals.
- Women: Love, frustration, and the link between female sexual frustration and sterility. Erotic feeling never fully triumphs in romantic relationships.
- Death: A dominant theme, representing human tragedy. Death is not unexpected, as it is part of life’s journey.
First Stage
- Blends avant-garde and pure poetry with traditional Arabic poetry, popular songs, and Andalusian and national influences.
- Key works: Poema del cante jondo and Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads).
Second Stage
- Poet in New York: A masterpiece denouncing capitalist society, highlighting its lack of solidarity, exploitation, and racism. Expresses personal conflicts, emotional rootlessness, loss of identity, and homosexual love.
Rafael Alberti
Neopopularismo Stage
- Draws on traditional Andalusian songs and folk music. Sailor Ashore is a notable work.
Neogongorina and Avant-Garde Stage
- Shows admiration for Góngora (Soledades) and incorporates surrealism to reflect personal desolation and despair, foreshadowing his social and political commitment of the 1930s.
Committed Poetry
- His Communist Party membership led him to reject his earlier bourgeois work.
- Writes politically charged poetry with a combative and aggressive tone, addressing contemporary events.
Poetry of Exile
- Thematic shift towards varied subjects, though exile, Spain, and longing for homeland remain prominent. Returns to classical forms with less formal experimentation.
Luis Cernuda
Collected his poetry under the title The Reality and Desire.
- Contrasts the poetic with the world, freedom with social hypocrisy, and established values with the force of desire and homosexual love.
- Explores themes of failed imagination, longing for an ideal world, loneliness, anxiety, the passage of time, the pursuit of absolute beauty, and the sense of love’s destiny.
- Poetry of exile becomes more reflective and objective, pondering time, aging, and death.