Generation of ’27: Poets, Theater, and Post-War Spanish Culture
The Generation of ’27: A Literary and Theatrical Movement
The Generation of ’27, also known as the 1-D payroll authors, is analyzed in the context of the celebration in Seville Ateneo, an event marking the tercentenary of the Baroque poet’s death (17th century) Góngora in 1927. In 1945, Pedro Salinas’ essay, “Nine or Ten Poets,” reminds us of Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Emilio Manuel Altolaguirre, and Meadows.
Different Names for a Poetic Group
Following Julius Peterson’s features for defining a literary generation, we note that not all traits are met. These authors are referred to as Generation ’27 or a generation of poets, almost all of whom were teachers. They are also known as the generation of friendship, the generation of 1924-25 (dates related to the publication of their first books), and the generation of the dictatorship, due to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Lorca, Guillen, and Rivera. They represent more extreme poles and understand the Noucentisme as a bridge between the Generation of ’98 and Peterson’s Generation of ’27.
The requirements not met include the absence of a national or international guide. There was no rise against a common style; instead, there was mutual respect despite natural professional, ideological, and aesthetic differences. A symbolic tribute to Góngora was paid by poets and the bullfighter Ignacio Sanxez Mejias in Seville in December 1927 at the Athenaeum. The student residence, where many lived or attended cultural events, and their dedication to collecting the literary tradition were also significant.
Aesthetic Affinities
Although each poet follows their personal journey, we highlight the tendency to synthesize and balance different style traits, achieving a balance between the intellectual and sentimental. Some accuse the poetry of intellectualism. The poet creates quasi-mystical connections. There’s a balance between human authenticity and aesthetic purity, a union of clarity and secrecy, popular and cultured elements, the minority and the vast company, and the universal and the Spanish.
Evolution of the Group
Before the Civil War, poets faced choices: pure poetry, avant-garde paths or currents, neopopularists, classical, neo-romantic, surrealistic, or civilly concerned. After the Spanish Civil War, this dialectic was maintained, focusing on the dehumanization or rehumanization of art. There is continuity in the poetry of the 40s and 50s, with a distinction between official poets (ideologically aligned with the winners) and unofficial ones.
Pedro Salinas (Madrid 1892 – Boston 1951)
A doctor of letters dedicated to university teaching in Spain and abroad, Salinas was exiled during the war. He remains a significant figure in literary history as a great poet of love, with his work, Voz a ti debida, standing out. He was also a playwright, short story writer, and novelist. His work requires special mention as he was a great connoisseur of the work of El Cid. Poetry is a way to access reality, the essence of things, and vital experiences. His poetry is full of paradoxes, unusual observations, subtle plays of ideas, and concepts. His poetic language is condensed, and his metric is simple. His subject is love.
Federico Garcia Lorca (Fuentevaqueros 1898 – Viznar, Grenade 1936)
Lorca began races in Grenade and studied law and letters. He also studied music with Manuel de Falla. In 1919, he installed himself in the student residence in Madrid, making friends with young artists and poets who formed his poetic group. From 1929-1930, he was a fellow in New York. Upon returning to Spain in 1932, he founded La Barraca, a university theater group that traveled to perform classical works. Within his poetic group, Lorca exemplifies the trajectory from “me to us.” His work is admired for its roots in the popular, its tragic depth, and its extraordinary art. His fame is universal.
Characteristics of Lorca’s Work
- The theme of tragic fate and the impossibility of realization gives a serious underlying unity to his poetry and theater.
- His poetry is bustling, full of grace, discomfort, and frustration.
- His writing binds passion and formal perfection, the human and aesthetically pure.
- His style blends deep popular and cultured roots with old Castilian meters and bold metaphors.
- He joins the poet’s inspiration and conscious work.
Theater After ’36
Post-War Theater
The world stage in recent decades has collected the heritage of the avant-garde and extended previous dramatic conceptions of Brecht, Artaud, etc., showing amazing variety and richness in renovative trends. Spanish theater in the 40s had obvious limitations due to special political and cultural constraints. Buero Vallejo is the first tragic playwright of our days, while Miguel Mihura holds a summit in the postwar comic theater.
New Dramatically
Brecht and Artaud created in the 20s and 30s the two most fruitful lines for the later stage: a sound, political, and dialectic theater on one side, and an amazing drama and principles of ritual on the other. Symbolist and experimental theater movements of the avant-garde also played a role. The first theaters in our new century are presented as a reaction against the two traits of realism. There is a part of realistic theater that accurately reflects customs, environments, and human problems, while elsewhere, psychological analysis transcends reality, suggesting the unseen, creating poetic atmospheres, and bringing in a theater of mystery. Expressionist theater misrepresents, shaking the viewer’s sensitivity with the aim of protesting against the natural and accentuating the theatricality of the scenographic resources and interpretation. Dadaism and Surrealism entailed a violent break with the conventions of traditional theater. The precursor of this line was the Frenchman Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) with his work Ubu Roi.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) proposed an epic drama that invites reflection and criticism of social and political conditions. As a Jew and Marxist in Nazi Germany, he had to exile himself. His work shows a world dominated by money, and his characters are contradictions of humanity and social alignment. Antonin Artaud (1896-1940), a nonconformist personality, exasperated and led to madness. As a visionary poet, he was linked to surrealists. His work as a stage director was capital for contemporary theater. He exposed theatrical ideas in The Theater and its Double (1938), reflecting aspects in our current theater. Artaud rebelled against the primacy of the text, advocating for a total theater against a realistic and rational theater, returning to its origins. Artaud’s theater intends to end the passivity of the spectator, trying to shake them with violent images to provoke failure. Artaud’s time was rediscovered 20 or 30 years later, influencing the American ‘Living Theater’ and European theater after Grotowski.
The global theater of the absurd and the avant-garde experimental theater prominently emerged in France in 1950 with Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, followed by the works of other authors like Beckett.
Theater of the Absurd
The Theater of the Absurd has an existentialist conception of the world, close to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The topics listed are man lost in an absurd world, anguish at the time, death, and nothingness. The novelty lies in the forms of dramatic expression, introducing an absurd shape, mixing the grotesque and the tragic, and remarkable figures of anguish. The remarkable figures of this movement are Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
Ionesco, a Romanian-French author, bursts on stage with The Bald Soprano (1950), a work where, in addition to no bald singer appearing, the scenes unfold without sense and grotesque language.
Beckett, born in Ireland (1906), wrote most of his first drama in French. His work Waiting for Godot (1953) is one of the peaks of contemporary theater, where characters wait for Godot, of whom nothing is known and who never arrives.
Experimental Theater
This name designates a range of activities that continue searching for new dramatic forms outside commercial theater. Primacy is given to the spectacle, above the literary text. Plastic and sound elements become important, engaging the viewer in the spectacle. This desire leads to happenings, which show in public and improvise together actors from any event. The traditional separation between the stage and the audience is broken. In Europe, the Polish director Grotowski, following Artaud’s line of ritual theater, adds scenic nudity, leading to his theater being called poor theater. The Living Theater is the maximum representative of experimental theater.
Post-War Spanish Theater
Commercial and ideological conditionings shaped post-war Spanish theater, creating a distinction between “visible” theater and “underground” drama. A number of political and cultural conditionings in this period of history highlight the Russian Revolution (1917), World War I (1914-18), etc. Other conditionings are of an economic nature, as theatrical companies depend on the interests of entrepreneurs and undergo public tastes. Ideological censorship imposes limitations. Theatrical success before the Spanish War was in full swing, with representatives of bourgeois comedy (Benavente), poetic theater (Marquina), and comic theater (Arniches Muñoz Seca) consolidating in ’27. After the war, with some respected writers missing and others exiled, there are new playwrights and trends on stage.