The Generation Of ’27: Its Characteristics And Most Important Authors
Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda… are just some of the names that have remained forever embedded in a generation of poets, the famous Generation of ’27. And, although this group has received different names from time to time, Throughout history (Generation of the Republic, of the Dictatorship – by Primero de Rivera -, of the avant-garde, of friendship…) its name has been linked for posterity to the third centenary of Góngora’s death, commemorated in 1927 and that brought them all together.
Who were the poets of ’27? Why do they constitute a generation? And what is a literary generation, exactly? In the following article we will give a brief review of one of the most famous poetic groups in Spanish literature.
What are the characteristics of the Generation of ’27?
The German critic Julius Petersen, in his work The Literary Generations, established what were the essential requirements for a group of writers to be classified as a generation. Among these conditions were coexistence over time, similar academic training and the establishment of personal relationships between members.
All of them are fulfilled by the poets of ’27. On the one hand, contemporaneity is obvious; All its members were born in the period of time between 1891, the year of Pedro Salinas’ birth, and 1906, when Manuel Altolaguirre came into the world, the youngest of all. That is to say, from the oldest to the youngest of these poets there was a separation of seventeen years, which fits perfectly with the concept of generation, which is usually established at about twenty-five years.
Regarding similar academic training, it is known that all of them had a university education and had liberal and progressive ideas. On the other hand, the majority were linked to the Free Education Institution, especially to the famous Madrid Student Residence. This Institution, incorporated into Spanish education by the pedagogue Julián Sanz del Río (1814-1869), sought to renew the educational panorama of the country, inspired by the precepts of Krausism.
Finally, The personal relationship between the poets of 27 is a more than proven fact, not only because of the large number of letters that were exchanged, but also because of the praise that they dedicated to each other in their writings. In fact, the friendship that united these poets transcended the war and exile, to which most of its members were driven.
We have already commented that the most popular name of the group comes from the admiration that everyone felt towards Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), the brilliant Spanish poet of the Golden Age, whose death three centuries were commemorated in 1927. This event brought together the poets at the Ateneo of Seville (who by that time had already published their first works) in what turned out to be a fiery defense of the baroque poet.
It is not surprising that Góngora aroused so much sympathy among those young enthusiasts. The poets of the 27th They had abandoned the idea of poetry linked to emotion and were openly leaning towards a much “purer” poetic expression, which was based on the concept of “art for art’s sake”, which had been so in vogue at the end of the 19th century with aestheticist currents. Thus, these poets picked up the idea of “pure poetry” promulgated by Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and which in Spain at the time was personified by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), whom the poets of the 27th century considered the master. of teachers.
In this way, Góngora, with his careful culteranism and his exaltation of language through his pure metaphors, represented a bright point of the past to cling to. The poets of ’27, at least in their first stage (later we will see that their thinking evolved towards more social positions) longed for a poetry that dispensed with argument and dedicated itself exclusively to the intrinsic beauty of poetic expression. The only thing that mattered in a poem was, then, beauty. Nothing else.
For this reason, in their early youth, the poets of ’27 did not feel special admiration for Antonio Machado (1875-1939), whom they considered too connected to the life circumstances and the subjective emotion of the author. For his part, the Sevillian poet felt a similar disdain for these young authors, whom he accused of giving more importance to the concept than to emotion. However, social upheavals and war were about to change this approach.
Social conflict and “committed poetry”
In April 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, and the poets of the 27th, mostly Republicans, joyfully embraced the direction that events were taking However, social conflicts are intensifying. The Asturian miners’ revolution of 1934 and its violent repression by the army left the poets mired in sadness and frustration. Was that the Spain they had longed for?
The violence exerted against the Asturian miners deeply marked many poets of the generation. Of all of them, the first to take a radical turn towards “committed poetry” were Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) and Emilio Prados (1899-1962), truly shocked by the tragedy. The former had already published Elegía Cívica, his first social poem, in 1929 (perhaps spurred by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera), and in 1933 he founded the magazine Octubre, with a clear communist ideology. At that time, Alberti had publicly renounced his previous poetry, which he categorically called “bourgeois.” For his part, Emilio Prados dedicates the subtitle of his work Crying in the blood to the repression of the Asturian miners.
The events in Asturias and the context of general crisis that the Republic is experiencing only accelerate the decline of the “pure poetry” that those of ’27 had defended with such zeal. In his prologue to the poetic anthology of Ediciones Austral (see bibliography) , the literary critic and expert on the Generation of ’27 José Luis Cano (1911-1999) collects the answer that Federico García Lorca gave to a journalist in 1936 when he asked him about “art for art’s sake.” The Granada poet stated that the poet’s mission was to “get into the mud” with the people, which makes Lorca’s social ideology and the direction the generation’s perspective was taking quite clear.
Parallel to the apogee of poetry committed to society, to which all the poets of the 27th adhered, a new recognition arose for the figure and work of Machado, so ignored until then And, of course, if there was someone who reacted negatively against this rise of social poetry it was Juan Ramón Jiménez, the once acclaimed teacher of teachers who had now gradually been left on the sidelines.
“The Hatless”
In recent years, the figure of women of this generation has been vindicated (and rightly so). Known as “Las Sinsombrero”, this group of women contemporary with the “canonical” authors of the Generation of 27 They played a great role in the Spanish artistic and cultural panorama in the first decades of the 20th century
The nickname comes from a well-known anecdote. One day, the surrealist painter Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) proposed to her companions on the walk, the also painter Margarita Manso (1908-1960), Lorca and Salvador Dalí, to take off their hats in the middle of Puerta del Sol in Madrid, to “decongest the ideas”. In statements that Maruja offered many years later, she confessed that passersby had stoned them. Without a doubt, taking off your hat in the street represented an important act of rebellion, especially if it came from a woman.
Although many of them were not strictly poets, they did maintain very close ties with the poets of ’27 and made very significant contributions to the Spanish culture of the Republic. Especially sad is the case of Marga Gil Roësset (1908-1932), an excellent sculptor who took her own life, among other things, because of her impossible love for Juan Ramón Jiménez.
War and exile
Returning to the aforementioned Julius Petersen, another of the characteristics that the German critic proposes for a literary group to be considered a “generation” is the existence of an event, generally traumatic, that affects all its members. And although at the beginning the poets of ’27 did not have something similar (as those of ’98 did, with the disaster in Cuba and the loss of the colonies), The end of the generation was marked by the tragedy of the Civil War and exile
The war marked all the members of the group, in one way or another. There is no need to say anything about Federico García Lorca; His murder at the hands of the rebels in 1936 is well known. But perhaps we should also mention another death, that of José María Hinojosa (1904-1936), introducer of surrealist poetry in Spain and murdered by anarchist and socialist militias for being right-wing militant. The same horror, both on one side and the other. The monster of war ate his own children.
The majority of poets of the 27th (Alberti, Salinas, Guillén, Cernuda, Prados, Altolaguirre) were forced into exile. Others, such as Vicente Aleixandre, Gerardo Diego and Dámaso Alonso, remained in Spain. But both were marked by the twilight of the war and the death of their companions; especially, that of Lorca, the soul of the group. His postwar poetry, both that of the exiles and those who remained, was tinged with sadness. A generation was ending, cut short by a fratricidal struggle and overshadowed by the dictatorship that came after.
