Spanish Poets of the Generation of ’27: Themes and Styles

Posted on Jan 12, 2025 in Latin

Jorge Guillén

Jorge Guillén does not even pretend to communicate the essential idea or feeling in his sample to be related to reality. Love takes wing as good and comes fully enjoying what is around you. Time lets you live intensely and enjoy life. He touches on the theme of chance and chaos. His language is concise and precise. His meter is varied: romance, sonnet, and song. In his creation, different realities are represented: material and spiritual. The fundamental issue of his work is the man in relation to reality.

Gerardo Diego

Gerardo Diego’s poetry is characterized by its thematic and formal variety. He uses different styles and trends, including traditional art. His topics include love, landscape, experiences, and, above all, music. On poetry, he focuses on the expression of traditional lyric in the first stage. He was influenced by Bécquer and modernism. In Absolute Poetry, he focuses on creation and art. In Image and Manual of Foams, he uses a creationist stage influenced by cubism. In Manual, he interweaves phrases.

Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca was a prominent figure of the Generation of ’27. His work often features tragic and violent themes. His personal topics include:

  • Love: Erotic love and sex are seen as an energy of fullness, but also as a source of frustration.
  • Death: Often seen as the failure of love.
  • Childhood: Represents innocence.
  • Social Themes: Explores frustrated lives and social imposition.

Constants in his work include symbols, visionary images, and musicality. He uses both popular classical meters (sonnet) and free verse. He sought his own aesthetic. In Poetry Book and Lament for Sánchez Mejías, he explores various themes. In Gypsy Ballads, Andalusia is represented by Gypsies, with themes of love and death, many lyrical elements, traditional metrics, and different symbolisms. In Poet in New York, he expresses solitude and suffering, passive pain, the presence of the lyrical, and surrealism, using metaphors, visionary images, and free verse.

Rafael Alberti

Rafael Alberti tried different trends. His poetry is a form of communication, reflecting life experiences. His main topics are:

  • Paradise Lost: Represents Cádiz.
  • Anguish
  • Social Concern

His work is related to painting and musicality, with a variety of metrics. His orientations include:

  • Neopopularism: Traditional poetry and avant-garde.
  • Baroque: Influence of Góngora and avant-garde.
  • Surrealism: Social concern.
  • Exile: Remembrance.

In Sailor on Land, he expresses nostalgia for Cádiz and uses traditional poetry to evoke childhood and adolescence. In About the Angels, he reflects on a personal crisis, loneliness, pain, and the loss of paradise, using surrealism to depict positive and negative aspects.

Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda’s work is a representation of his biography. The fundamental issue is the opposition between reality and desire. In reality, he finds beauty and perfection. Constants in his work include:

  • Love: To meet others, freedom, rebellion without eroticism, and pain.
  • Loneliness: Dislocated against loneliness, only love can save you.
  • Time: Transience, things will not last.
  • Nature: Remembrance of paradise lost.

He uses both free and classical meters, as well as images. His work is divided into two stages: the first until 1936, and the second during his exile. He was influenced by the avant-garde. In Reality and Desire, there are four editions:

  • Eclogue, Elegy, Ode: Nature opposes the present and the past.
  • A River, a Love: Influence of surrealism, no metric regularity.
  • Forbidden Pleasures: Prose poem, confessional style.
  • Where Oblivion Dwells: Pain of love, search for harmony between frustration, finished love equals death.

Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente Aleixandre was devoted to poetry. For him, love is an erotic and vital impulse that ends in destruction. Nature is a source of life, and he embraces pantheism. He was influenced by surrealism. His meter focuses on rhythm, using short verses and extensive verses. He has three stages:

  1. Surrealism
  2. Humanism and solidarity
  3. Internal reflection

Notable works include Swords as Lips and Destruction or Love.