Generation of ’27: Spanish Poetry’s Golden Age
The Generation of ’27 refers to a group of Spanish poets (including Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Altolaguirre, and Emilio Prados) connected by friendship and shared experiences between 1920 and 1936. The group’s name originates from the 1927 tercentenary celebration of Góngora’s death, a previously overlooked figure in Spanish literature. These poets championed Góngora’s relevance and shared a liberal, progressive ideology, similar age, and many hailed from Andalusia but resided in Madrid. Several were associated with the Residencia de Estudiantes, a hub for new cultural trends, and the Centre for Historical Studies, where they explored medieval and classical authors. Highly cultured and intellectually restless, they were often academics or involved in education, and many were also literary critics who contributed to the same journals.
Influences and Characteristics
Poetry was their primary genre. Their notable influences include:
- Moderate influence from Avant-Garde movements.
- Earlier authors like Rubén Darío, the Machado brothers, and Juan Ramón Jiménez.
- Classical authors such as Góngora, Manrique, Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and, from the 19th century, Bécquer.
- A significant influence from traditional ballads and folk songs.
A key characteristic of their work is a sense of balance:
- Between intellect and emotion.
- Between technical rigor and inspiration (classical vs. romantic poetry).
- Between popular and refined elements, tradition and innovation.
- Between Spanish identity and universal themes.
Evolution of the Generation of ’27
The poetry of the Generation of ’27 can be divided into three main stages:
1. Early Period (Until 1927)
This period shows influences from Bécquer, Modernism, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and popular poetry, followed by the early Avant-Garde. Góngora’s influence is strong, symbolizing a love for art and perfect form. Traditional stanza forms were employed.
2. Pre-Civil War Period (1927-1936)
The focus on form lessened, and Góngora’s influence diminished. A “rehumanization of poetry” emerged, with a desire for more intimate communication with the reader. Surrealism emerged, shifting language from reason to the subconscious. Surrealist poems aimed to evoke emotional responses rather than rational understanding, using unconventional imagery and metaphors.
Surrealism also reintroduced human, social, and political themes into poetry, reflected in the ideological shift of poets like Prados and Cernuda towards revolutionary activism. Most members, to varying degrees, supported the Republic.
3. Post-Civil War Period (Post-1936)
The Civil War shattered the group. Lorca was killed in 1936, and most others went into exile, except for Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, and Gerardo Diego. Exile poetry focused on themes of displacement and longing for home (e.g., Alberti’s “Return of the Living Far Away”). Those who remained in Spain, distanced from the regime, explored themes of human anguish, death, the meaning of life, injustice, and evil (e.g., Alonso’s Hijos de la ira, Aleixandre’s Shadow of Paradise, Salinas’s El Contemplado, and Guillén’s Clamor).
Formal Innovations and Themes
Metric Innovations
Free verse became a prominent formal innovation, rejecting traditional metrics like syllable counts, pauses, accents, and rhymes. Instead, rhythm was based on repetition of ideas, words, and sentence structures (parallelism, anaphora). Free verse was seen as necessary to express the chaos and disorder of a fractured world, and to represent the irrational world of the subconscious.
Survival of the Popular
The resurgence of popular themes is evident in works like Alberti’s Marinero en tierra (1925) and Lorca’s Romancero Gitano (1928). These works feature parallelism, assonance, short verses, and popular poetic forms, characterized by direct, dramatic imagery and a sparse use of adjectives.
Influence of the Classics
Works like Gerardo Diego’s Versos humanos and Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love demonstrate the continued influence of classical forms like the sonnet.
Themes
- Love: Cernuda, Aleixandre, and Salinas explored love in different ways. For Cernuda, love was impossible and led to loneliness. Aleixandre saw love as a merging of selves. Salinas viewed love as an art requiring effort and imagination.
- The Passage of Time: This universal theme was particularly poignant for exiled poets like Alberti, whose Return of the Living Far Away evokes memory and nostalgia.
- Fullness: Jorge Guillén celebrated the world’s inherent goodness in works like Cántico. Salinas also explored fullness, but in connection with love.
- The Civil War: Initially, social issues were not central to the group’s work. However, Lorca and Prados began to express the world’s chaos in works like Lorca’s Poet in New York and Prados’s Andando andando por el mundo. The Civil War marked a turning point, with poets like Alberti using powerful imagery to depict a wounded Spain. Cernuda saw the true Spain as lost, becoming a “citizen of nowhere.” Works like Alonso’s Hijos de la ira and Aleixandre’s History of the Heart anticipated the social poetry of the 1950s.
- Loneliness: Prados captured the feeling of displacement in works like El pozo and Jardín Cerrado. Loneliness was also a central theme for Cernuda.
- Death: Lorca consistently explored death, from his early works like Libro de poemas and Poema del cante jondo to his masterpiece, Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.