Generation of ’27: Spanish Poetic Renaissance

Posted on Feb 17, 2025 in Latin

Generation of ’27: A Spanish Poetic Renewal

The Generation of ’27 was a group of authors, primarily poets, who renewed Spanish lyric poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. They fused traditional and classic poetic forms with the most innovative and cutting-edge trends.

Members

The group included: Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Emilio Prados, and Manuel Altolaguirre.

Common Ground

The members were aware of their shared generational identity and had several points in common: friendships, similar ages, middle-class families, strong intellectual backgrounds, participation in the 1927 tribute to Góngora, and publication in the same magazines.

Stages

  • Formation Stage: Dehumanization predominated, assimilating the new “pure poetry” of Juan Ramón Jiménez.
  • Consolidation Phase: Each member of the generation achieved their own poetic voice. There was a progressive humanization.
  • Disintegration Stage: Lorca was killed in the Spanish Civil War. After the war, some remained in Spain, in internal exile, while others went into exile abroad. Poetry became simpler, more heartbreakingly human, and socially engaged. Some of these poets reached their peak after World War II, with poetic texts reflecting existential anguish.

Characteristics

A set of common characteristics explain their renewal of poetic language:

  • Balance: Between the avant-garde and tradition, the intellectual and the sentimental, the cultured and the popular.
  • Synthesis of Different Poetic Currents: A taste for traditional and popular lyric, the influence of the classics (especially Góngora), the influence of Bécquer and many foreign poets, and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “pure poetry.”
  • Direct Teachers: They saw Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ortega y Gasset, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna as direct teachers.
  • Stylistically: They used metaphors, images, traditional metrics, and a wide range of topics (nature, death, freedom, love, etc.).

Poets of the Generation of ’27

Pedro Salinas

Salinas’s poetry intended to express authenticity and intelligence, in addition to beauty. His style followed the patterns of pure poetry: naked, without excessive sentimentality. He preferred short meters and usually did not use rhyme.

  • First Stage: Pure poetry, avant-garde elements, and a significant presence of Random Security. This was a creative dialogue phase of the self with things.
  • Second Stage: Love poetry that reflects a love ordering the world, giving meaning, and love found in the dialogue with the ego of the beloved. (Voice Due to You, Reason of Love)
  • Third Stage (in exile): Presents a greater commitment to the world: with nature, with the anguish of modern man in a dehumanized society. (The Covered, All Lighter)

Jorge Guillén

Guillén was the maximum exponent of poetry. He sang the joy of being in existence. His style is very elaborate, with classical metrics. His work is included in what he called Our Air. There are three cycles:

  1. Celebrating life and the world.
  2. A world outcry against historical events undone by pain.
  3. An optimistic tone, the evocation of historical characters, people, buildings and cherished places.

Gerardo Diego

Diego is known for his formal, stylistic, and thematic variety. He combined popular and cult classic and avant-garde elements.

  • Avant-garde Poetry: Picture. Merges Creationism with Gongorism.
  • Traditional Poetry: Varied both thematically (love, landscapes, etc.) and formally (sonnets, ballads, etc.). The Ballad of the Bride.

Rafael Alberti

Alberti is known for his wide variety of themes, shapes, colors, styles, and influences. His main themes are nostalgia, anxiety, and social and political commitment. Like Lorca, he combined the cultured and the popular, the traditional and the avant-garde.

Three stages:

  • Neopopularism: Recreating forms and resources of traditional and popular lyric from a modern perspective.
  • Avant-Gongorism: Reflects the influence of modernism and the assimilation of Surrealism.
  • Political Commitment: He considered his earlier poetry as bourgeois and committed to a poem of civil engagement (The Poet in the Street).
  • Exile: Politics and poetry, also a poem of nostalgia in exile.