Spanish Poetry: Themes, Styles, and Key Poets
Poetry of Knowledge
Poets seek a shift from the collective to the personal, comprehending the world individually. They aim to raise awareness and communicate through their work.
Topics:
- Time: Lost paradise of childhood and adolescence, sadness.
- Love: Erotica, individual experiences, friends.
- Creating Poetry: Metapoetry (reflection on poetry).
General Characteristics:
Colloquial language, free verse, humor and irony (detached from reality), meditative or reflective character (tendency to nominalization), further elaboration of poetic language.
José Ángel Valente
His poetry is a constant inquiry into language to reach poetic knowledge and his own salvation, trying to understand the world from the poet’s experience as conditioned by society. Over time, his work becomes critical (social poetry).
Stages:
- 1st Stage (1955-1960): Personal experience, precise and sober verse, metaphysical and religious concerns, and lost childhood.
- 2nd Stage (1966-1970): Stage of destruction, knowledge, criticism, marked by disappointment.
- 3rd Stage (1972-1976): Fragmentary poems predominate. Later, unknowable poetry where the word is essential.
Ángel González
Stages:
- 1st Stage (1956-1967): Knowledge, deception, existential pessimism, criticism of the surrounding world; poetry = instrument clarifying both the experience of the poet and society.
Topics:
Passage of time, love, heartbreak, childhood as paradise lost, passing historical irony as a parody of the world.
- 2nd Stage (1971-1985): Playful irony, humor, broken phrases, neologisms, word games.
- 3rd Stage (1922-2000): Meditation, time, and witness to historical time.
Jaime Gil de Biedma
His poetry is based on personal experiences evoked from the distance imposed by the passage of time. He incorporates his daily life and private self from an observer’s perspective, including emotional and analytical aspects, a split personality (observer self, observed self = talks to himself); intertextuality (Machado, Becher, Cernuda, self-citations) = culture escapism. The quality of mankind is defeat.
Key Works:
- Traveling Companions (1959): Poetry aims to change social attitudes towards the ethical situation of historical Spain; time and love.
- Moralities (1966): From the collective to the individual without untying the personal from the social.
- Posthumous Poems (1968): Splitting of the observing ego, angst over time.
The 70s: The Last Things
Broke with realism and left the ”literary” humanism, which viewed literature as a tool in the fight against injustice.
Poets:
Leopoldo Panero, Pere Gimferrer
Traits:
Reference for mass culture coupled with Camp taste (a combination of folk art forms) and culturalism (continual references to works and authors) and the preference for European and Latin literature.
Topics:
Urban culture (media and advertising, sports, comics, movies, or collective myths), exoticism and beauty (Venice), reflection on creative writing, influence of Surrealism (collage and incorporates the flash movie); secrecy; careful rhetorical preparation.
From 1975 to Present: Recent Trends in Poetry
Rescued continuity with the Spanish literary past.
Themes and Style:
Intimacy and emotion, urban themes, daily life, autobiographical tone, love, loneliness, over time, anxiety about death, poetry more balanced rhetoric, colloquial language, irony allows detachment from reality, classical metric forms, free verse.
Trends:
- Neosurrealism: Generation of ’27 and Surrealism: Blanca Andreu
- Romanesques: Importance of song, death: Antonio Hills
- Poetry of Silence, Minimalist or Conceptual: Valente fragmentary poetry, short verse: Jaime Siles
- Epic Poetry: Nature and idyllic past, Julio Llamazares, Julio Martínez Mesanza
- Sensualist Poetry: Erotic, body, night, sea: Ana Rossetti
Poetry of Experience
It locates the text in a here and now, looking for a wide audience.
Topics:
Daily events, urban reality, intimacy, concern over time and its influence on people and things, thinking about life, narrative poems and anecdotes, conversational and dramatic monologue (observer recounts experience).
Represented by:
- Luis García Montero: Urban poems, everyday love and commitment; elements of reality/fantasy irrationalism -> poetic vision of life and the world; consideration that everyday life has over himself = safety.
- Jon Juaristi: Social trends, irony -> Spoof (cynical character) intimacy.
- Miguel d’Ors: Emotional intimacy (the autobiographical), religious and family themes; careful technical preparation.