Spanish Post-War Poetry and Novel: Trends & Authors
Spanish Post-War Poetry and Novel
From the end of the Second World War, the world was divided into two blocs during the Cold War. The 1960s brought significant changes, generating a new cultural climate and the development of consumer society. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the world headed towards a new industrial transformation thanks to advances in new technologies.
In Spain, after the Civil War and Franco’s triumph, the country was plunged into economic and cultural depression. Literature from the end of the Civil War until today follows an evolutionary process linked to historical events, immediately after the war and the Franco dictatorship. The desolation of the 1940s gave rise to existential literature. The 1950s derived into social themes, and the 1960s generated a great technical renovation and experimentalism, while the 1970s mainly affected artistic expression. From the 1980s, literature offered a great variety.
Blas de Otero (1916-1979)
Blas de Otero’s poetic work is a clear example of the stages of Spanish poetry since the war. His poetry is part of the line of ‘desarraigada’ (uprooted) poetry and expresses deep existential and religious concerns, collected years later in ‘Ancia’ (1958). His poetry calls for freedom and social justice with ‘Pido la paz y la palabra’ (1955). In his later years, he sought new roads, as seen in works like ‘Historias fingidas y verdaderas’ (1970).
Jaime Gil de Viedma
This poet from the Barcelona School is a clear representative of the poetic renewal that occurred in the 1960s. His poetry focuses on the exploration of personal experiences, developing from the anecdotal, moral reflection, or intimate. Gil de Viedma deals with issues such as childhood nostalgia, teenage love and eroticism, friendship, and time, as well as ethical and social concerns. Influenced by the poet Luis Cernuda, he exerted a considerable influence on later poets of the 1970s and 1980s. His work is assembled in the volume ‘Las personas del verbo’ (1959-1968).
Poetry from Post-War to the Present
The decade of 1940 generated a number of poets who grew in two different fields:
- Rooted poetry: Using classical forms, religious sentiment, and a worldview as an ordered and consistent whole.
- Uprooted poetry: Inaugurated by Dámaso Alonso in his book ‘Hijos de la Ira’ (1944), expressing existentialist rage through images and free verse, heartbreaking anguish of man, and his religious doubts.
Decade of 1950
This latest trend of uprooted poetry drifted into social themes, where poetry became a weapon loaded with future and followed the line of poets from the Generation of ’27 and Miguel Hernández. More personal themes included solidarity, expressed through a clear, direct language.
Decade of 1960
The social drift in poetry returned to the intimate experience without abandoning some concern for humanity, with an ‘inconformista’ (nonconformist) attitude. It utilized anti-rhetoric and a conversational style, but dense and rigorously refined, sometimes including irony.
Decade of 1970
This decade is represented in the Spanish anthology ‘Novísimos’, a group of authors born after the war, the Generation of ’68. They had a high experimental and avant-garde vocation, with an ‘inconformista’ attitude towards cultures.
1980s
This decade highlights trends in the poetry of experience, classical avant-garde, and experimentalism, with current poets such as Antonio Colinas, Luis García Montero, etc.
Novel from Post-War to the Present
In 1940, two novels were published, beginning the resurgence of the novel from an existential realism perspective: ‘La familia de Pascual Duarte’ (1942) and ‘Nada’ (1945). The existential theme of the novel raises the social vacuum of a community, narrated through technical innovation. In the 1950s, the Generation of ’50 suggested a very critical view of society at that time through social realism. Their language is simple and uses narrative techniques, sometimes with objectivism. In the decade of 1960, the novel entered a period of intense renewal.