Spanish Poetry: Generation of ’27 – Authors and Traits
The Poetry of the Generation of ’27
The Generation of ’27 (G27) was a group of Spanish writers and poets who emerged after 1920. The members of the G27 shared three fundamental characteristics:
- Main Features: They were all born between 1892 and 1902, had similar intellectual backgrounds, and paid homage to Góngora in 1927.
- Influences: From Modernism, they took artistic rigor, a minority attitude, and a mysterious conception of poetry. From Juan Ramón Jiménez, they adopted aesthetic purity and the idea of poetry as knowledge.
- Linguistic Traits: They employed expressive resources of the irrational, such as synesthesia and symbolism. They cultivated metaphor and imagery, experimented with meter and rhythm, and viewed reality from a deeply personal perspective.
G27 poetry often utilizes a cultivated and complex language, challenging the reader to decipher its meaning while simultaneously striving for beauty through highly developed language. They aimed to capture reality in words.
This poetry underwent an evolution, a “re-humanization.” It began with a focus on imagery and language, but in the 1930s, it shifted towards a poetry filled with human content.
Prominent Authors:
- Pedro Salinas: Influenced by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salinas cultivated pure poetry. Like Jiménez, he sought to penetrate the hidden essence of things with an intellectualized, deceptively simple poetry. His work can be divided into three stages:
- Stage 1: A blend of pure poetry and futuristic themes.
- Stage 2: His most important stage, focusing on the world, love, and joyful experience, with a predominance of dialogue and conceptual language.
- Stage 3: Objective and committed to reality.
- Jorge Guillén: Maintained an almost unchangeable thematic unity: his vision of the world and the universe, life and nature as a well-made work, and absolute being and existence, leading to a splendid vitalism.
- Gerardo Diego: His poetry developed along two lines: traditional and avant-garde.
- Dámaso Alonso: A renovating poet, Alonso composed in two stages: pure poetry and a second, existential and social stage.
- Federico García Lorca: Cultivated both theater and poetry. In both genres, the central theme is death, or, in the latter case, love driven by pain, frustration, and death. His work is divided into two stages: one traditional and popular, and another closer to Surrealism.
- Rafael Alberti: His verse is characterized by chromatic tones and a perfect handling of rhythm and musicality rooted in Spanish tradition. His poetic evolution includes three stages: a traditional and popular stage, a Surrealist stage, and a third stage where he humanizes his verses.
- Vicente Aleixandre: Most of his work follows in the footsteps of Surrealism. He later moved away from the dehumanization of the avant-garde and reflected on the human condition.
- Luis Cernuda: His poetry expresses the inconsistency of his tortured privacy, marked by the pain and frustration resulting from the mismatch between reality and desire. His development began with pure poetry and was later influenced by Surrealism.
- Miguel Hernández: An intimate and committed poet.