Spanish Poetry After 1939: Trends and Key Figures
Spanish Poetry After 1939
If in 1927 the tercentenary of Góngora erected the banner for the new poets, in 1936 the centenary of Garcilaso de la Vega was the summary of the new taste. Hence the talk of “Garcilasoism”: a poetic power that is modeled for the recovery of classic-like and excuse for a theme based on Love, God, and the Empire, which clearly conflicts with the Spanish reality of the time.
1944 marked a turning point in this scenario of cardboard, and this is due to Children of Wrath (1944), by Dámaso Alonso, which catalyzes the entire accumulated distress and opens a pathway for the manifestation of what is not yet simple to name. The anti-Garcilasoist reaction is based on an aesthetic of indirect confrontation: in front of neoclassicism, formal freedom; against triumphalism, doubt or pain; against clerical rhetoric, dialogue with a conflicting God. These currents will be in existential journals such as Espadaña (León, 1944), around Victorio Crémer and Eugenio de Nora, Steed (Valencia, 1942), and Proel (Santander, 1944).
Exceptions to This Mostly Realistic and Existential Picture
- The Postismo Phenomenon: With its Postismo magazine, the first phase from 1945 to 1949. Postismo recovered the taste for the game, specific to the forefront around the names of Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Eduardo Chicharro, and Ángel Crespo.
- The Extension of a Certain Explicit Surrealism: From the hand of Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Shadow of Paradise, by Vicente Aleixandre.
- The Group of Cántico Magazine: From Córdoba, whose first stage will be from 1947 to 1949, in which there is a vindication of the Beautiful South and owes much of modernism, or the recall, also goes against the dominant literary world – the sensual image and the poetics of ’27, namely Luis Cernuda.
The Rise of Social Poetry in the 1950s
The 1950s brought about the rise of social poetry that seeks to deepen the realist aesthetic with a distinctly left-wing bias. A key feature is the belief in poetry as “an instrument, among others, to transform the world” (as Gabriel Celaya wrote) and as communication, something that Carlos Bousoño will theorize from Aleixandre’s ideas. Other authors of this generation are José Hierro and Ángel González.
Poets of the 1950s and the Concept of “Poetry of Experience”
The so-called “Poets of the ’50s” developed the most personal of their work in the sixties. However, their first steps were taken in this social trend. The originality of the group of ’50, and as the key innovator of language, is that, even within realism, they bury the concept of poetry as an instrument, be it to transform the world (Celaya), or for intersubjective communication (Bousoño). The denial of these earlier ideas starts from the article by Carlos Barral, “Poetry is not communication”, published in Issue 23 of Laye, in 1953. In it, Barral said that poetry is primarily a means of knowledge, first, to the poet himself.
The abandonment of any possible instrumental conception of poetry is to circumscribe the reality referred to very specific coordinates, everyday. Thus, Jaime Gil de Biedma presents his own poetry as “poetry of experience.”