Vanguard and Generation of ’27: A Comparative Study of Spanish Poets
Vanguard and Generation of ’27
Tradition and 27: In the following authors, tradition, popularity, and tragic strength unite. These authors were more marked by war and the Civil War. Lorca and Hernandez died at early ages, while Alberti was exiled.
Gerardo Diego
Gerardo Diego was born in Santander and was a professor at the Instituto. He won the National Literature Award and the Cervantes Prize. He died in Spain and never went into exile. Diego masterfully alternated between traditional poetry and avant-garde art.
His poetry follows two lines:
- Traditional Poetry: Verses full of human truth. He turns to romance, to the tenth, and the sonnet. His subjects are varied: nature, religion, music, bullfighting, love…
- Avant-garde Poetry: Gerardo approached Ultraísmo and Creacionismo. His most important works are Image, Limbo, Manual of Foam, and Factory of Zeda X, characterized by the lack of punctuation, risky metaphors, and inconsequential issues.
Vicente Aleixandre
Vicente Aleixandre was born in Seville and raised in Madrid. He won the National Book Award and the Nobel Prize. He was very influenced by surrealism and the search for the meaning of man, the universe, and life.
His poetic career is divided into three stages:
- Pure poetry: Influenced by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salinas, and Guillén. His work is characterized by assonance in rhyme, by nature as a subject, and by a sense of serenity.
- Surrealist poetry: This time, there is greater freedom of expression and greater freedom in selecting topics. Works in this stage include Swords as Lips, Passion of the Land, Destruction or Love, and Shadow of Paradise.
- Anthropocentric poetry: Man becomes the center of his poetic universe. Highlights of his work include History of the Heart, In a Vast Dominion, Poems of Consummation, and Dialogues of Knowledge.
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda was born in Seville. He was a communist and belonged to the party during the Civil War. He left Spain and went into exile to England, later moving to America, where he died in Mexico. All of his poetry is collected in a volume called The Reality and the Desire, and its main themes are sadness, pessimism, loneliness, love, and the eternal opposition between reality and desire.
This work consists of eleven poems divided into four stages:
- Learning stage: His works include Poems, First Eclogue, Elegy, and Ode. He is influenced by Salinas, Bécquer, and Fray Luis de León. Its themes are love and dissatisfied nature.
- Stage of Youth: Surrealist period. Works like A River, A Love, and Vindication of Homosexuality explore forbidden pleasures. In his work Where Oblivion Dwells, he abandoned surrealism and sang of heartbreak and the gap left by lost love. Another project, Invoked, exalts the passion of love and heartbreak. It also develops the theme of pagan religion.
- Stage of maturity: The Clouds. Topics: personal problems, political exile, religious emotion, classic beauty, nature, the search for faith, and the problems of Spain. As He Awaits the Dawn. Themes: the fate of man, historical events, memories of his life and his homeland, young love, myths, Mexican adventure, and nostalgia for Andalusian nature. Living Without Living. Topics: love of the past, experiences in Mexican lands, remembering a lost friend, and an obsession with death and oblivion.
- Stage of completeness: The Desolation of the Chimera. Topics: the lament of an old heart that has only memories and unfulfilled desires, honors to their loved ones and beloved writers.
Rafael Alberti
Rafael Alberti was born in Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz). After the Civil War, he was exiled for belonging to the Communist Party. He lived in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rome. At the end of the dictatorship, he returned to Spain and was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1999. He died in 1999.
His poetry can be divided into five parts:
- Neopopularismo: Attempts to revalue Spanish folk poetry. The most important work of this period is Sailor on Land, which is characterized by dealing with adolescent themes of love, using sailor speech, and mocking creationists and surreal images, and lyrics of the traditional type.
- Neogongorina and avant-garde: In his work, we observe classicism, the secrecy, and the formal beauty of Góngora, using the classical sonnet, all sprinkled with avant-garde notes.
- Surreal: In his work, the poet seeks the lost paradise of angels and is influenced by surrealism and a deep personal crisis.
- Civil and political: In his works The Poet on the Street and Madrid, Capital of Glory, he enters into his political commitment, the horrors of war, and his disagreement with the Spanish situation.
- Nostalgia: Back in his works Living Far Away and Ballads and Songs of Paraná, written in exile, he continues his political poetry while at the same time recalling his childhood, his youth, and the landscape.
Miguel Hernández
, born in Orihuela (Alicante ) .- It is the youngest generation of 27.-At the beginning of the war he joined the Communist Party and went to the URS. “At the end of the war returned to Spain and decides to escape to Portugal where it-was detenido. repatriated and condemned to death .- He died in prison in Alicante at 32 years.-On Gongora and surreal aesthetics is considered a member of the generation of 27. – His work is divided into 4 parts: a) Pure: in his work Perito en lunas mixing scenes of everyday life and topics like death, bullfighting and sex. B) neo-romantic: in his work that does not stop Ray mixture Gongorism with the theme of love and suffering and pleasure. c) In emergency: at this stage believes that poetry is a useful tool for maintaining the morale of the soldier and to indoctrinate. Wind belong to this time the people and the man lurking. D) Internal Scan: Write Song and Ballad of absence in which he speaks of grief at the loss of freedom and family at the death of her first child and stay in prison.