Generation of ’27: Key Spanish Poets and Their Works
Generation of ’27: An Overview
Key Poets and Their Contributions
Pedro Salinas
Born in Madrid, Salinas taught literature at various universities. Influenced by Juan Ramón Jiménez, he cultivated pure poetry, seeking the essence of things with intellectualized yet deceptively simple verse. His work is categorized into three stages:
- A blend of pure poetry and futuristic themes (e.g., light bulbs, automobiles), including works like Omens, Insurance, and Fabula and Random Sign.
- His most significant period, focusing on love and joyful experiences. This stage features dialogue, conceptual language, short seven-syllable verses, and unrhymed silvas. Key works include: Voice Due to You (title taken from Garcilaso’s Eclogue III), where love is essentialized in pronouns; Love or Reason, continuing the exploration of love; and Long Sorry, a collection of poems on the indifference and death of love.
- His time in America, marked by works like The Set, which reflects on the sea. This period reveals anguish caused by modern technological civilization and the horrors of the Civil War and World War II, culminating in Trust.
Jorge Guillén
Born in Valladolid, Guillén was exiled to the United States, where he, like his friend Pedro Salinas, taught Spanish literature. He returned to Spain after Franco’s death and won the Cervantes Prize. Guillén remained dedicated to pure poetry, offering an optimistic view of the world, contrasting with Vicente Aleixandre’s pessimism. His complete works are grouped under the title Our Air, comprising five books: Song, Clamor, Homage, …And Other Poems, and Final. His elaborate language, preference for short and eleven-syllable verses, and rigorous word selection convey essential ideas and feelings. His themes include the affirmation of being, fullness, the passage of time, and the insecurity and suffering caused by randomness and chaos.
Gerardo Diego
Born in Santander, Diego taught literature in Soria. He received the National Literature Prize (alongside Rafael Alberti) and the Cervantes Prize. His poetry blends traditional and avant-garde styles. His creationist works include Image and Handbook of Foams. His traditional aesthetic is showcased in Human Verses, Soria, and Lark of Truth (a sonnet collection). His themes include love, God, music, nature, bullfighting, form, iconography, and beauty.
Dámaso Alonso
Born in Madrid, Alonso led the Royal Spanish Academy. He combined the roles of poet, linguist, and literary critic. His notable works include Góngora’s Poetic Language and Contemporary Spanish Poets, a series of studies on modern lyric. He edited Góngora’s works and considered himself a critic and poet within the first generation of post-war poetry (the “Poetry Uprooted” movement). The 1936 war led him to reject the purity advocated by Juan Ramón Jiménez. His most important post-war works are Sons of Wrath (1944), influenced by existentialism and biblical poetry, and Psalms, which sparked the “Poetry Uprooted” movement in Spain.
Vicente Aleixandre
Born in Seville, Aleixandre’s poetic vocation was awakened by his friendship with Dámaso Alonso. He won the National Prize for Literature in 1935 for The Destruction or Love, became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and received the Nobel Prize in 1977. Much of his work, including Swords as Lips and The Destruction or Love, aligns with Surrealism, using free verse and visionary imagery. He later developed a “poetry of communication” reflecting the social trends of the 1950s. Shade of Paradise (1944), along with Alonso’s Sons of Wrath, inaugurated the “Poetry Uprooted” movement. History of the Heart marked a shift towards social poetry. His later trilogy—Poems of Consummation, Dialogues of Knowledge, and Great Night—revisited Surrealism with philosophical and conceptist elements.
Federico García Lorca
Born in Granada in 1898, Lorca pursued humanities and law but was drawn to music. He befriended Manuel de Falla and lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes with artists like Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. After a period in New York, he returned to Spain and founded La Barraca, a traveling university theater group. His assassination in 1936 caused international outcry. Lorca’s work blends cultured and popular, traditional and avant-garde elements. His themes include ontological and social frustration, expressed through a rich symbolic system drawing from popular superstition, Shakespeare, and the Bible. He explored themes of loneliness, tragic fate, and the struggles of marginalized groups (homosexuals, women, children, the elderly, gypsies) against an oppressive society. His work is divided into neopopularist and surrealist phases.
- Neopopularist phase: Poem of Flamenco Singing, using short poems and broken meter; Gypsy Ballads, featuring 18 romances with the gypsy symbolizing innocence against societal norms.
- Surrealist phase: Poet in New York, expressing disillusionment with modern society; Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, an elegy for a bullfighter friend; and Sonnets of Dark Love, exploring homoeroticism.
Rafael Alberti
Born in Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), Alberti moved to Madrid, abandoned his studies, and pursued painting. He joined the Communist Party and was active in the Civil War, later exiled to Argentina. After returning to Spain, he received the Cervantes Prize. His work blends popular and cultured, concise and baroque, traditional and avant-garde elements. Sailor Ashore reflects neopopularism, evoking a lost paradise. Dawn of Dust and Lime and Song showcase neo-Gongorism. Concerning the Angels (1929), his masterpiece, explores a crisis of faith with Becquerian and surrealist influences. The Poet in the Street represents his politically committed writing. Ballads and Songs of the Paraná was published in exile.
Luis Cernuda
Cernuda studied under Pedro Salinas and taught at various universities. His poetry, collected under the title Reality and Desire, includes Profile of Air, Eclogue, Elegy, Ode, Forbidden Pleasures, Where Oblivion Dwells, A River, a Love, The Clouds, and (in exile) Desolation of the Chimera. He also wrote literary criticism and essays, including Poetry and Literature. His poetry avoids formal emphasis, favoring an indefinable air. He often eschews rhyme and meter, preferring assonance. He focuses on human experience but encourages reader identification. His themes include the clash between desire and reality, the solace of memory, and moments of timeless joy.