Poets of ’27: Influences, Styles, and Modernist Traits
Common Features of the Poets of ’27
Fervor for Góngora: Influence on Alberti, G. Diego, Miguel Hernández, Dámaso Alonso, who produced the edition of the Solitudes. It is the model for the development of image and metaphor, a fundamental element of these poets in the line of creationism and ultraism. Additionally, there is the influence of Garcilaso (Cernuda), Fray Luis, Bécquer…
Pure Poetry: Poetry that focuses more on the form, passing anecdote, elimination of any pathos, affects them all, especially in Guillén, Salinas, G. Diego. In this regard, the influence of French poet Paul Valéry and, especially, J. R. Jiménez is important.
Taste for Popular Poetry: (Alberti, Lorca, Gerardo Diego): Romance, seguidillas, songs, repetitions, parallels… Ballads (in Lorca and G. Diego), traditional songbooks (in Alberti), songs of Gil Vicente and Juan del Encina, and the people of Lope de Vega.
Importance of the Vanguards: (Gerardo Diego, Alberti, Salinas…) and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, many of whose verses resemble greguerías. Free-verse poetry and prose stanzas coexist with classic forms.
Variety of Topics: Using cutting-edge issues, related to art, modern and intellectual, but also traditional subjects or man-made, such as love, death, and the landscape.
Modernism: Key Characteristics
Modernism as a movement has the following characteristics:
- The creator is disturbed by society, is inclined to solitude, explores intimacy, and moves away from everyday reality. More importantly, boredom, sadness, melancholy, and existential angst are present. Thus, many critics have pointed out the romantic affiliation of Modernism.
- The writer maintains an anti-bourgeois stance, antirealist, and antivulgar, while attempting an aristocratic, elegant, cosmopolitan, and exotic art. Just like the romantic escapes from his world, hence their external environments are favored: classical antiquity, the legendary medieval world, and the eastern area of Paris.
- The creator maintains the formal cult of beauty through the idealization of reality.
Topics and Trends
The renovation is directed toward the following:
Topics: The modernists set out a rich vein that runs from classical to modern, from the medieval to romantic.
Attitudes: Emphasizes the Symbolist vision and interpretation of reality.
Poetic Trends
The colors, the sounds (alliteration, onomatopoeia, synesthesia, antepenultimate words, references to musical instruments), aromas (flowers and plants), tastes, and tactile impressions permeate the evocation of landscape, people, animals, and things through extreme stylization and idealization, but also are entered into the gray tones and intimate sensitivity, mood, or individual visions of the world. Thus, Rubén Darío expresses greater external sensuality, not forgetting the serious contemplation; Antonio Machado explores more in private, without forgetting the chromaticism of the landscape; and Juan Ramón Jiménez alternates both trends.
Language
Rhetorical resources come especially from Baroque and contemporary currents. The modernist symbol par excellence is the swan, which has different meanings: beauty, purity, elegance, ideal aspiration, the aristocratic (white), sunset (black). Its lexicon is enriched with exotic words, mythological gods, cultism, and neologisms.