The Generation of '27: its most important characteristics and authors

Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda... are just a few of the names that have been forever enshrined in a generation of poets, the famous Generation of 27. And, although this group has received various names throughout history (Generation of the Republic, of the Dictatorship -by Primero de Rivera-, of the vanguard, of friendship...) their denomination has been united for posterity to the third centenary of the death of Góngora, commemorated in 1927 and which brought them together all.

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 briefly review 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 Literary Generations, established the essential requirements for a group of writers to be labeled a generation. Among these conditions were the coexistence in time, a 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 Pedro Salinas was born, and 1906, when Manuel Altolaguirre came into the world, the youngest of all. That is to say, that from the oldest to the youngest of these poets there was a separation of seventeen years, which It fits perfectly with the concept of generation, which is usually set at around twenty-five years.

As for similar academic training, it is known that they all had university education and had liberal and progressive ideas. On the other hand, most of them were linked to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, especially the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. 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.

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Admiration for Góngora and "pure poetry"

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 was commemorated in 1927 by three centuries. This event brought together the poets at the Ateneo de Sevilla (who had already published their first works at that time) 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 enthusiastic young people. The poets of 27 they had abandoned the idea of ​​poetry linked to emotion and were openly leaning towards a much more “pure” 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 aesthetic currents. Thus, these poets picked up the idea of ​​"pure poetry" promulgated by Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and that in the Spain of the moment was personified by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), whom the poets of 27 considered the master of teachers.

In this way, Góngora, with his careful culteranismo and his exaltation of language through his pure metaphors, represented a luminous point of the past to cling to. The poets of 1927, at least in their first stage (we will see later that his thought evolved towards more social positions) they longed for a poetry that dispensed with argument and devoted itself exclusively to the intrinsic beauty of expression. poetics. The only thing that mattered in a poem, then, was 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 with the vital circumstances and with 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.

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Social conflict and "committed poetry"

In April 1931 the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, and the poets of 27, mostly Republicans, joyfully embraced the course that events were taking.. However, social conflicts intensify. The Asturian miners' revolution of 1934 and its violent repression by the army left the poets mired in sadness and frustration. Was this 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 the Civic Elegy in 1929, his first social poem (perhaps spurred by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship), and in 1933 he founded the magazine Octubre, clearly communist in ideology. At that time, Alberti had publicly abjured his previous poetry, which he categorically branded as "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 the general crisis that the Republic is experiencing only accelerate the decline of the "pure poetry" that those of 27 had defended so vigorously. 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 the art". The poet from Granada stated that the poet's mission was to "get into the mud" with the people, which makes quite clear Lorca's social ideology and the direction taken by the perspective of the generation.

Parallel to the heyday of poetry committed to society, to which all the poets of 27 adhered, a new recognition arose to the figure and to the 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 formerly acclaimed teacher of teachers and who had now gradually been left behind margin.

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"The Hatless"

In recent years, the figure of the women of this generation has been vindicated (and rightly so). Known as "Las Sinsombrero", this group of contemporary women to 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 walking companions, the also painter Margarita Manso (1908-1960), Lorca and Salvador Dalí, take off their hats in the middle of Puerta del Sol in Madrid, to "decongest the ideas”. In a statement that Maruja offered many years later, she confessed that passersby had stoned them. Undoubtedly, taking off one's hat in the middle of the street represented an important act of rebellion, especially if it came from a woman.

Although many of them were not strictly poetesses, 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 group to literary is considered a "generation" is the existence of an event, generally traumatic, that affects all its members. 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. Nothing needs to be said about Federico García Lorca; His assassination 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 the surrealist poetry in Spain and assassinated by anarchist and socialist militias for being a right-wing militant. The same horror, both on one side and on the other. The monster of war ate its own children.

Most of the poets of 1927 (Alberti, Salinas, Guillén, Cernuda, Prados, Altolaguirre) were forced into exile. Others, like Vicente Aleixandre, Gerardo Diego and Dámaso Alonso remained in Spain. But both one and the other 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 that of those who stayed, was tinged with sadness. A generation ended, cut short by a fratricidal struggle and overshadowed by the dictatorship that followed.