Generation of ’27: Spanish Literary Movement & Lorca’s Poetry
The Generation of ’27
The Generation of ’27 was a constellation of writers who emerged in Spain around the year 1927, the tercentenary of the death of the Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Their aesthetic attempted to find common elements between popular culture and Spanish literary and aesthetic avant-gardes. This movement evolved from pure poetry to human engagement, which resulted in the revelation of Surrealism and even political compromise. The group dispersed after the majority went into exile abroad and within Spain after the Civil War.
The strophic flow is reduced, modernist expressive formulas are enriched, such as visionary images, free verse, and impure verse by Pablo Neruda. It renews and updates the thematic repertoire: Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso.
Poetics
Their poetic expression has two facets: overwhelming vitality, full of sympathy, and distress and frustration that beat in all his work. This second aspect is reflected in the theme of fate. The people and worship are twinned in his work. It is full of traditional elements of their land and people: tearful love, courage, passion, melancholia.
Lyrical Works
- Libro de poemas (Book of Poems): The poet’s deep malaise. Nostalgically evokes her childhood from the perspective of a youth crisis.
- Primeras canciones (First Songs): Tragic subjects enrolled in environments like the dawn, the night, the Andalusian city. These are very heterogeneous works, avant-garde continues nostalgia for childhood.
- Poema del Cante Jondo (Poem of the Deep Song): Thematic and formal unity, inspiration, folk, lyrical neopopulist describes the generations of 27.
- Gypsy Ballads: Death and the moral incompatibility of Gypsy with bourgeois society. Standard procedures in the poetry of popular origin. Lorca’s Gypsy character rises to the rank of literary myth.
- Poet in New York: Lorca wrote this play from his experience in the U.S. where he lived between ’29 and ’30. Modern civilization and nature are incompatible. New York is a nightmare and desolation, images vivionarias surreal language, freedom of expression is maximal, the free verse warns the use of measured verse.
- Diván del Tamarit: A book of poems with an Oriental flavor, inspired by the collections of ancient Arabic-Andalusian poetry, love frustrales subject to bitter experiences.
- “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”: Elegia of uncontrollable pain and emotion that acts of homenjae the bullfighter in Seville.
- Six Galician poems: Sonnets.
- Galician dark pain: Erotic-loving.
Style
Rich symbols, often associated with death. Some symbols recur in the poetry of Lorca are:
- The Moon: symbolizes death, eroticism, beauty, and fertility-sterility.
- Water: when running, is a symbol of vitality, but when standing is a symbol of death.
- Blood: symbolizes life, death when it spills, also the sexual and fertile.
- Horse and Rider: unbridled passions, the male, but also death.
- Weapons of metal: death, betrayal.
Metaphors
Metaphor is the main rhetorical device of Lorca’s poetry. Under the influence of Góngora, Lorca very risky using metaphors, the distance between the real and the imaginary term is considerable. Related elements opposed to reality.