The Generation of ’27: A Poetic Renaissance in Spain

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 in Latin

The Generation of 27

In 1927, a meeting was held at the Ateneo de Sevilla to commemorate the tercentenary of the death of Góngora. The meeting was attended by a group of authors who admired him for the development of his poetic language. This date is used to name them as a group: the Generation of 27.

This group had a great intellectual formation; several were university professors. They held a cordial relationship and often collaborated on the same literary magazines, such as The Gazelle, Literary Magazine Coast, or The West.

Traditionally included in this group of poets are Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Pedro Salinas, Dámaso Alonso, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Emilio Prados, and Manuel Altolaguirre. Besides poetry, some, like Lorca and Alberti, also wrote drama.

Characteristics of the Generation of 27:

  • They sought the aesthetic renovation of Spanish poetry. To do this, they took the innovations brought by the avant-garde, but without forgetting the importance of the Spanish literary tradition.
  • In their poems, they carefully renewed language through the use of religious vocabulary, slang, and terms far removed from traditional poetry.
  • Metaphor became the most important literary resource. This is a figure well-suited to handle surreal content.
  • As for meter, they used classical verse forms such as the sonnet, the romance, or the carol, but also innovated with the use of blank verse, free verse, and vers libre. In any case, freedom in meter is one of the characteristic features of this group.
  • They evolved from a thematic point of view. Initially, the main concern was the form of the poem, art for art’s sake, but little by little (under the influence of Surrealism), the authors developed a more humanized poetry, more concerned with pain, joy, and memories. The Civil War emphasized the humane vision of poetry, to the point that many authors chose to engage with the topics involved. We note that an author like Alberti, for example, will range from pure and aseptic poetry in Marinero en tierra (1924) to deeper engagement in The Poet on the Street (1936).

Features:

  • The avant-garde poet is dissatisfied with the past; they must find an art that responds to the new inner man, based on the original novel that takes shape.
  • They must abandon old themes, since they lack substance and do not respond to the new man.
  • In some movements, there is a tendency to make words collaborate with the plastic arts.
  • Poetry constantly plays with symbols.
  • The poets react against the traditional rules of versification; they need more freedom to adequately express their inner world.
  • They react against modernism and the imitators of the masters of this movement; there is a social consciousness that leads them to take positions regarding man and his destiny.
  • New themes, poetic language, formal revolution, the disappearance of the story, suggesting topics such as anti-patriotism.
  • The narrator’s point of view is manifold.
  • There is a close link between the environment and the character’s tastes.
  • They delve into the inner world of characters, presenting them through their most hidden states of mind.
  • Chronological time is not important, but rather the time that encourages and takes into account the presentational aspect, as it merely suggests to readers the completed story; the author requires the presence of an attentive reader who unravels the facts presented and intelligently assembles the pieces to understand the novel of our time.

Influences

The future did not hold too much influence on members of the Generation of 27, although we can highlight some, such as Pedro Salinas and Rafael Alberti.

  • Creationism, a literary avant-garde movement developed by Huidobro, whose main representative in this group is Gerardo Diego. In some of his poems (“Picture”, 1922), there is a need to create a new reality, one that has nothing to do with the sensory world. Words become the center of attention, not their meaning.
  • Ultraism proposed to capture the world through fragmented images and illogical perceptions. The magazine Greece welcomed this movement after the publication of the Ultra Manifesto in 1919.
  • Surrealism influenced virtually all members of the Generation. It arrived in the late 1920s and was greeted by a large number of poets. The expression of the subconscious world, dream elements, and visions appear frequently in the work of Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, and Cernuda. Poetry gains freedom, both thematic and formal, and human content returns. Thanks to Surrealism, poetry flourished in the 1930s.

Among the influences on the authors of ’27, we must mention two poets who were already completely consecrated by then: Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Both are taken as models and are admired and respected, despite the different aesthetic conceptions reflected in their works.

Moreover, the French poets Valéry and Mallarmé, the great introducer of the avant-garde in Spain, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the leader of the Generation of 98, Miguel de Unamuno, and the great essayist and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset were also influential.

Although the avant-garde advocated a complete break with all art before them, the authors of ’27, even taking advantage of the innovations that the isms provided, preferred to look to the best of Spanish literature. Thus, they admired Jorge Manrique, Garcilaso de la Vega, San Juan de la Cruz, Lope de Vega, and Quevedo. From Rubén Darío, they took the artistic value of language, and from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the seemingly simple treatment of themes and poetic forms. In addition, authors such as Alberti and Lorca found inspiration in popular Spanish forms—romances and short ditties—giving them a religious treatment, called neopopularismo.

The Avant-Garde

Between the two world wars, several movements of aesthetic revolution and artistic transgression arose in Europe: the avant-garde movements. Some of them were short-lived. Others, such as Cubism, affected painting. In literature, the most important avant-garde movement was Surrealism. It emerged in France where, in 1924, André Breton published a “manifesto” of the movement. It acquired great importance in cinema, painting, and poetry.

With the desire for a true liberation of human life, Surrealism sought to dive beyond reality and logic. In this way, they sought to release and express repressed impulses, the depths of the human unconscious. In poetry, surrealist writers used the technique of automatic writing. Thus emerged the claim that “surrealism” is a true free expression of speech that leads to unusual lexical associations and irrational, dreamlike images.

In Spain, two poetic avant-garde movements became relevant: Ultraism and Creationism. The latter’s father was the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro.

  • Futurism, promoted by the Italian Marinetti, called for a break with the aesthetics and themes of the past and celebrated art, mechanical civilization, sports, etc.
  • Dada was born thanks to the Romanian Tristan Tzara. His ideas, which opened the way to Surrealism, advocated fantasy, irrationality, the rejection of logic, and inconsistency. Like Futurism, it was short-lived.
  • Creationism: the poet does not seek to imitate reality but rather to create within the poem.
  • Ultraism includes elements of Futurist and Dadaist influence. In the latter two movements, a certain visual poetry is sometimes used, especially in the verses, which provides a unique form.