Spanish Literature: Poetry of the 60s and Theater of the 27
The Poetry of the 1960s
Leading poets of this generation are Angel Gonzalez, Jaime Gil de Viedma, and Felix Grande. Their concept of poetry changed: its goal is no longer communicating with a wide audience. Communication is only one element of poetry, but not the principal means. Poetry is seen as a means of understanding reality and personal experience.
- The topics lean toward intimacy and the recreation of individual experience, hence the denomination of the “poetry of experience”: love, friendship, work, childhood, or adolescence.
- The treatment of language: the colloquial tone seeks an individual style, where humor, irony, and songs produce the feeling of a cozy and intimate conversation with the reader.
The Theater in the Generation of ’27
The most important authors are:
Alejandro Casona
He achieved fame with Our Lady Natasha and Dawn. They are a mix of reality and fantasy with little individual character and rhetorical language.
Max Aub
Author of a valuable theatrical production that includes avant-garde and anti-realist works such as Mirror of Greed and San Juan. The latter reflects the drift of a ship full of Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazis.
Federico Garcia Lorca’s Plays
Lorca’s theater may be called poetic because of the root of the poetic language from which it is born. His arguments and his dominant theme are always the same: the clash between the individual and authority. The individual has desire, love, and freedom as weapons, but is defeated by authority, that is, order. His works are dominated by female characters.
Lorca’s Theater Classification
Early Works
His first dramatic attempt, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, was unsuccessful.
The Farces
Tragicomedy of Don Cristobal and Miss Rosita is a farce. This theatrical line of farces has other examples, such as The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplin with Belisa in His Garden. The two are pieces that provoke a bitter laugh from the traditional theme of a woman married to an old man.
The Opera House
Mariana Pineda is the first attempt to bring lyrical drama, representing the story of a heroine killed for embroidering a Republican banner in the era of absolutism.
Surrealist and Engaged Theater
Buster Keaton’s Promenade announces the turn to surrealism. Two works that witness this shift are The Public and If Five Years Pass. The first displays a homosexual love story, and the second is “an impossible comedy” that cancels the conventions of realist theater space and time. Humor, lyricism, and atmosphere are the defining characteristics of this “legend of time.”
Rural Dramas
Lorca’s most important works are called the rural trilogy: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. The three have common features: the nature of the problems dealt with, women as protagonists, the setting in the Andalusian countryside, and the tragic outcome.
- Blood Wedding represents the preparations for a wedding between the bride and groom.
- Yerma is a drama about a sterile woman.
- The House of Bernarda Alba is a very intense drama; it is Lorca’s masterpiece, where the poetic language achieves an accent difficult to surpass.