Mastering Catalan Verse: Salvador Espriu and Estellés

Salvador Espriu: A Pillar of Catalan Literature

Salvador Espriu was a Catalan poet, playwright, and novelist. His work is characterized by a mixture of extreme intellectualism and a caustic descriptivism that possesses a unique singularity. With his idiomatic wealth, complex themes, and diverse sources, as well as his ability to describe transcendent themes within collective history, he is considered one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Catalan literature.

The Lyrical Cycle and Civic Discourse

In his first book of poetry, Cementiri de Sinera (Sinera Cemetery), Espriu evoked a world destroyed by war. The following four books—Les hores, Mrs. Death, El caminant i el mur, and Final del laberint—were called the lyrical cycle and outline a path that leads to the internalization of the mystical experience of Final del laberint.

The book with the most resonance is La pell de brau (The Bull's Hide), which acquired the character of a civic discourse where the author spoke of general freedom, justice, and tolerance. This work became qualified as realistic. The large resonance given to him by his poems being set to music and sung by Raimon helped the popularization of a work that served, practically until the poet's death, as a pillar for patriotic awareness in terms of national morale and Catalan society.

Vicent Andrés Estellés: The Voice of the People

Vicent Andrés Estellés began to write poetry after the war but was best known in the 1970s. His poetry is not easy to pigeonhole as it is prolific, original, and exuberant. He was an admirably passionate poet portraying everyday life. His themes include love, death, sex, fear, and women.

Language, Identity, and the Valencian Tradition

Estellés was a poet of detail who, through tenderness, anger, sarcasm, and love, expressed the glory and misery of a country. He built his literary language on:

• The classic Valencian poetry of the fifteenth century.
• The language of contemporary works of Catalan and Valencian literature.
• The colloquial language he learned in Horta during his childhood.

Presented as an interpreter of the claims of the people, the homeland was for him a collective drama, a shared language, and the tragedy of a culture. Estellés discussed the specific death of a daughter, a cemetery, or a niche. However, maintaining an obsessive attraction to love, his poetry appeared in a diverse range of sensations ranging from direct expressions of sex to more sophisticated manifestations of desire.

Style, Rhetoric, and Popular Appeal

The poetry of Estellés also shows a particular style and rhetoric, including a parody of the classical tradition of eclogues or topics of the Valencian Renaixença. Estellés is a very personal Valencian voice throughout contemporary Catalan literature. Thanks to his style, lucid use of language in its formulation, and management of expressive forms, he is tied with passion to the most popular and beloved poets.