Spanish Postwar Poetry: Trends and Key Figures
Postwar Poetry
The Civil War, the beginning of the Franco dictatorship, and the exile of many Spanish people, including many intellectuals, interrupted the natural evolution of culture and Spanish literature. In a postwar period reduced by the lack of freedom and a society surrounded by poverty and hunger, poetry and literature undertook a difficult path between 1939 and 1950.
Only two approaches seemed possible: either approve the new situation or reflect the hopelessness in the present and the future, as defined by Dámaso Alonso as rooted literature and uprooted literature.
Rooted Poetry
Cultivated by authors of the Generation of ’36, rooted poetry, to condemn the dictatorial regime, adopted a classical form (sonnets) and a heroic tone when they used the Spanish imperial past to exalt the present order. Notable poets include:
- Luis Rosales
- Luis Felipe Vivanco
- José García Nieto
Uprooted Poetry
Unlike the previous one, uprooted poetry reflected the vicissitudes of the human individual in times of distress and pain, internal and external continual anxiety, and lack of faith in the future. It is an existentialist poetry that soon evolved into social poetry.
Notable poets include:
- José Luis Hidalgo
- Ángela Figuera Valverde, who defended that reality and daily life must be central to poetry.
Faced with the entrenched harmonious world of the rooted poets, the existentialists showed the individual and his misfit dialectic with the environment in which they lived. The language used is torn, and the influence of Miguel Hernández is enormous.
Besides rooted and uprooted poetry, other minority trends emerged in the forties: Postismo, which proposed to continue the rescue and surreal poetic language of images through a new and surprising approach (Eduardo Chicharro and Juan Eduardo Cirlot), and the Cántico group and its poets, Ricardo Molina, Juan Bernier, and Pablo García Baena.
Social Poetry
Existentialist literature consistently leads to literature in social realism. The writers go out of their inner anguish and contemplate what is happening in the street. Their point of view changes, and they attempt to present objectively the Spanish collective life and its conflicts through a forceful tone of testimony, protest, and denunciation of the social situation. They require a transformation in society and have faith in literature as an engine of that change.
Poets are made aware of their role in society and the importance of society in their poetry. Since 1950, they denounced the exclusion, unemployment, and the lack of freedom, and called for justice and peace in Spain. Highlights include Otero, Celaya, Cremer, and Nora.
Words like commitment and solidarity best expressed the feelings of these poets because they seek to share their poetry with others and that their work is not theirs, but everyone’s. Social poets awarded poetry to the work of collective and historical function, so it must be realistic.
- Victoriano Crémer: Founded Espadaña magazine with Eugenio de Nora. His work, torn and alarmist in tone, is first existentialist and then social.
- Gabriel Celaya: Is the author of an extensive and uneven production. Although he began publishing before the Civil War, his most famous work was developed from 1947. Existentialist during his publication of Tranquilamente hablando and in his social time Cartas boca arriba. Subsequently, Celaya wrote experimental poetry.
- Blas de Otero: Is the great poet of the war and his work outlines the evolution of Spanish poetry from 1939 until his death. Censored and banned on several occasions, both for his personal attitudes and for the strength of his word, he divided his life between trips, lectures, and poetry readings. His three stages coincide with the poetry of Spanish poetry: existentialist, social poetry, and experimentalism.
- José Luis Hidalgo: Leaves a chilling existentialist work, metaphysics, and religion.
- José Hierro: Begins in existentialist poetry, intensely personal lyrics and projection, with Tierra sin nosotros, later integrated into social poetry. Later books are Libro de las alucinaciones and Cuaderno de Nueva York.
- Eugenio de Nora: Focusing on the themes of pain and love, is the existentialist Cantos al destino. He is the first of all in social publishing books of poetry: Pueblo cautivo and España, pasión de vida, which includes several poems written in the previous decade.