Generation of ’27: Spanish Poets Overview
Generation of ’27: A Poetic Overview
Pedro Salinas
Intellectual Poetry
Salinas explored the intellectual world through dialogue with the poet or lover, seeking access to essential truths. His style is anti-rhetorical, employing familiar and everyday language, simple images, light rhythms, and short lines without rhyme or assonance.
Poetic Career
- Avant-garde influence (Omens, Secure Chance, Fable and Sign)
- Love poetry (The Voice Due to You, Reason of Love, Long Lament). In this stage, he becomes a poet of love, finding meaning in the world through authentic correspondence and dense conceptual language.
- Exile period (Contemplación-Dialogue of the Sea with Puerto Rico). This period reflects a clearer, yet unpleasant, view of a dehumanized society, employing a tragic-humorous tone with renewed confidence and optimism.
Jorge Guillén
Pure Poetry
Guillén, a key figure in pure poetry, presents a stylized and dehumanized reality and emotions.
Poetic Path
- Cántico (1928-1950): Marked by stylistic drive and an optimistic attitude towards life, featuring an elaborate and dense style, abstract nouns, musicality, sentimentality, and intellectualized modern language within classical verse.
- Clamor (Maremagnum, Which the Sea Will Give, The Height of Circumstances): Expresses protest against chaos and destruction, utilizing more colloquial language.
- Homenaje: Adopts a pessimistic tone, attenuated by reflections on writers, friendships, cities, and peers.
Federico García Lorca
Theater
Lorca’s poetic theater presents a stylized reality, focusing on individual confrontation, the desire for freedom, and the repressive power of mothers, neighbors, or the social environment. This conflict leads to destruction, concluding with the individual’s demise (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba).
Poetry
Lorca’s poetry expresses tragic drama through characters struggling against adverse fate, frustration, and impossible desires (Poet in New York, Gypsy Ballads).
Poetic Career
- Early works blend popular tradition with modernity (Book of Poems, Poem of the Cante Jondo, Gypsy Ballads), portraying Roma dignity amidst doom and a tragic vision of a mythical Andalusia.
- Surrealist influence with bold imagery, irrational attitudes, protest, rebellion, and free verse (Poet in New York). The city symbolizes a materialistic civilization that destroys human freedom.
- Later works (Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Six Galician Poems, Divan of the Tamarit, Dark Love Sonnets).
Rafael Alberti
Versatile Poetry
Alberti’s work displays a wide range of themes and styles, demonstrating technical mastery and a blend of traditional and avant-garde influences.
Works
- Theater: Political (Night at the Museum, The Lawn of War), avant-garde (The Uninhabited Man), poetic (The Scarecrow).
- Prose: Lost Grove (1949-1987).
- Poetry: Neo-popularism (Sailor on Land, The Lover, Dawn of Alehi, Popular Lyrical Forms), avant-garde (Masonry, On the Angels, I Was a Fool and What They Saw of Me, A Silly Echo, Tribute to Cinema), committed (With These Shoes I Have to Die, Revolutionary Poetry, A Specter is Haunting Europe, Madrid, City of Glory), exile (Exile, Lyrical Theme, Maritime Tide, Songs and Ballads of Paraná).
Luis Cernuda
Intimate Poetry
Cernuda’s poetry is characterized by an intimate, romantic tone, exploring the confrontation between desire and reality, feelings of homesickness, loneliness, and a yearning for beauty.
Poetic Career
- Pure poetry (Profile of Air)
- Classical poetry (Eclogue, Elegy, and Ode)
- Surrealist influence (A River, A Love, The Forbidden Pleasures, Where Oblivion Dwells, Invocations)
- Civil War period (The Clouds)
- Exile period, culminating in works like Who Awaits the Dawn, Living Without Living, With the Hours Counted, The Chimera of Desolation.
Miguel Hernández
Poetic Career
Hernández’s poetic journey evolved from elaborate forms influenced by Góngora (Perito en Lunas) to existential torment (El rayo que no cesa) and social commitment (Viento del pueblo, El hombre acecha, Cancionero y romancero de ausencias).
Poetic World
- Tragic sense of life: Intense drama and desperate tone reflecting a tragic conception of existence.
- Love of the earth: Loving tone intertwined with agony, carnal love, and natural world imagery.
- Political and social commitment: Solidarity with others, social and political themes, and a focus on collective action against injustice.
Metrics, Language, and Style
- Metrics: Popular and cultivated forms, traditional rhythms, classical verse, and later free verse influenced by Neruda.
- Language and style: Spontaneous yet carefully edited, using repetition, antithesis, synesthesia, and expressive adverbs. Poetic vocabulary evolves from archaisms to more natural language.