The Generation of ’27: Key Figures, Styles, and Legacy
The Generation of ’27
The Generation of ’27, named in homage to Gongora, whose anniversary was celebrated in 1927, is one of the most important literary generations in Spanish history. It is primarily a generation of poets, although Federico García Lorca also developed theater with great brilliance. The best of the work of the other members is found in their poetry.
The Generation of ’27 had a first stage prior to 1936 in which almost all members worked on parallel tracks. This generation echoed many currents, cultivating leadership in its various versions:
- Ultraism and Creationism with Gerardo Diego
- Manual Foam Futurism at Cal y Canto by Alberti
- Surrealism in Lorca’s Poet in New York and Cernuda’s works
- A river of love by Aleixandre, and Espadas como labios
Salinas and Guillen leaned toward a pure poetry, purified of everything that is not lyric emotion, as seen in Voice to you due and Canticle. Also grown in these early stages neopopulism Alberti with Sailor on land, and Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads include either a classic root poetry inspired by Garcilaso, Lope and Gongora as human Verses Gerardo Diego.
After the war, the trajectory of these poets diverged significantly. Lorca was dead, and Alberti, Cernuda, Guillen, and Salinas were in exile, the last two dying there. They continued to write poetry away from the enthusiasm of their early years. Guillen had time for Clamor, Salinas hoped to return sometime in The Confident, Alberti’s melancholy tinged Baladas y canciones del Parana, and Cernuda was obsessed with the end in A few hours or Despair of the chimera. Damaso Alonso, who before the war had cultivated poetry only tangentially, published Sons of Anger in 1944, which, together with Shadow of the Paradise by Vicente Aleixandre, constituted a turning point in postwar poetry and had a decisive influence on the poets of succeeding generations.
Modernism
Modernism is a broad term that covers all the arts and indicates a current of common artistic renewal of Western art from the early twentieth century, known as Art Nouveau in France and “modern style” in Anglo-Saxon countries. We define it as an art movement that seeks refinement in decoration and fantasy in forms. Its backgrounds are in:
- Parnassian aesthetics with its quest for an aseptic art of “art for art’s sake”
- Fin de siecle decadence that is at the margins of society, attacking the bourgeoisie and its hypocritical morality
- Symbolism, which uses the symbol as a fundamental poetic mechanism
The introducer of modernism in Spain was the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario. In his works, “Blue” or “Songs of Life and Hope”, all the characteristics of the movement are present: a quest for beauty, disinterest in the social dimension of art, suggestions, symbol, musicality of the verses, correspondence between the poet’s moods and the changing seasons of nature.
The Modernist generation in Spain and the Generation of ’98 are two simultaneous movements that have the same origin: dissatisfaction with the literature of the time and finding a new language. It is the artist’s response to the bourgeois world in which they live, showing their contempt for the commodification of art. There are two ways of reacting to the crisis of the century. Modernism seeks a world based on their aesthetic rebellion against bourgeois values, creating an elaborate artistic language, separate from the usual language, and accessible only to the initiates, while the 98ers do not try to build a parallel world, but try to interpret the existing reality, accepting the need for reform. They attempt to seek a review of the intellectual essence of Spain, a Spain that, without leaving its roots, gets a chance to change. Many writers had their noventayochistas modernist stage, including Antonio Machado and Valle-Inclan.