Postwar Catalan Poetry: Trends and Authors

Posted on Feb 19, 2025 in Latin

Postwar Catalan Poetry

We can observe three main trends:

  • Symbolist tradition:
    • Carles Riba represents a peak in this tradition.
    • Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel (1913-1938): New Poems.
    • Rosa Leveroni.
    • Màrius Torres: The Distant City.
  • Avant-garde tradition:
    • Josep Palau i Fabre: Poems of the Alchemist, Spiritual Song.
    • Joan Brossa. His work consists of three stages:
    1. Neosurrealism: The Ball and the Beetle, Fogall Sonnet.
    2. Everyday life and political commitment, with themes based on violence and oppression: Catalonia and the Forest.
    3. Plastic work.
Realist tradition:
  • Pere Quart: His best work, Corrandes d’Exili, is characterized by stylistic correctness, concretion, humor, and the expression of personal and collective history. Three stages:
    1. 1930s: Ironic humor. The Beast.
    2. 1940s and 50s: Time of exile and return to Spain after the war. Land of Shipwrecks.
    3. 1960s: Hope is reborn.
  • Salvador Espriu: Cemetery of Sinera, Walk by the Wall, and The Bull’s Skin (1960) [speaking of freedom, justice, and tolerance].

Miquel Martí i Pol

His themes are based on:

  • His bond with his people, where he has always lived.
  • His working conditions (from 14 years old, working in a textile factory).
  • A disease, multiple sclerosis.

Commitment as a poet with his class and country: “the people” and “factory”.

  • Heroes are ordinary people.
  • He prefers to describe what lasts over what is fleeting.
  • He uses straightforward language, rich in metaphors.
  • Because of his illness, solitude and death appeared in his poetry.
  • Later, he recovered thanks to an optimistic faith in the future: Dear Martha.

It must be said that he has been known to a wider public thanks to his adaptations of works by Louis Llach.

Valencian Postwar Poetry

Key figures include Joan Fuster, Vicent Andrés Estellés, and Narcís.

Vicent Andrés Estellés

Vicent Andrés Estellés was born in Burjassot (1924-1993). He was 12 when the Civil War broke out. The horrors of war were later reflected in his poems. The war brought shootings, death, hunger, and misery.

He worked at the newspaper Las Provincias. He participated in left-wing nationalist movements. Key works include City to Ear and Bitter Absinthe in the 1950s and 60s.

Two predominant themes:

  1. Civic engagement: Estellés is considered a voice for his people. He defends civil dignity.
  2. Theme of love: Love is a constant in Estellés’ work.

Features of Estellés’ Language

  1. Everyday speech: The approach is to facilitate understanding for readers and be faithful to his roots. He uses Valencian from L’Horta and common phrases.
  2. Use of comparisons: “I cook like the soul of the plant’s foot.” Comparisons abound in erotic nature.
  3. Characteristic use of adjectives: He uses double qualification (“unanimous outcry”), creating a slow pace.
  4. Repetition of words and phrases: Using polysyndeton, or excessive repetition of coordinating conjunctions. This presents the world as a set consisting of the juxtaposition of individuals.
  5. Parody: For example, replacing the head and shootings with farmers, as in the post-war poem “Rim of the Carraixet Canyon.”
  6. Metric variety: Compositions vary: long eclogues and very short poems, long and short verses, repetition of verses that frame the entire poem.
  7. Confessional poem: The poet chronicles his own past, often using the first person. He assumes the voice of the people.
  8. Dialogue poem: The self is split into an “I” and a “you,” a splitting of the poet.

Poetry in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century

This period is characterized by the progressive loss of the great masters of the war and the emergence of new generations.

During this period, major changes occurred: Franco’s death, years of transition, the configuration of the autonomous state, the consolidation of democracy, the adoption of laws, and the introduction of the normalization of Catalan in education.

The 1970s Generation

Formed by authors born and educated in the postwar Franco environment. Features:

  • Rejection of the realist aesthetic of previous authors.
  • Concern for language.
  • Cosmopolitanism.
  • Culturalism.
  • Formal experimentation (such as absence of punctuation).
  • Thinking about poetry as a subject of the poem.