Social Poetry: Celaya, Otero, and Spanish Transformation

Social Poetry: A Stage of Transformation

2nd Stage (Social Poetry): Gabriel Celaya's "Songs of Iberia" marks the first book of this stage. The author delves into his troubles and metaphysical concerns, finding solidarity with the suffering rather than religion. In his own words, the task is "to demonstrate the tragedy of living brotherhood and then as soon as possible through it." Blas de Otero, influenced by Marxist ideology, conceives poetry as a tool for social change. He addresses the "vast majority," contrasting with Juan Ramón Jiménez's slogan. Like Jiménez, he seeks simplicity of language, though sometimes only apparent, with a desire for accessibility to help transform the world.

The work begins with a quote from Don Quixote, "will not die sir, sir, but take my advice," and the 50th poem opens the book, declaring the abandonment of his previous poetry. Otero, like Machado, feels love and pain for Spain, evoking the distant past and the war fueled by hatred and blood. He conceives poetry as a struggle and construction, calling for peace, justice, and freedom, despite the pain caused by the country's history, proclaiming optimism and hope for a better future for Spain.

Stylistically, he abandons the dramatic tone of earlier poems, adopting more transparent and straightforward approaches. However, he uses common language in parallel ways, with plenty of phonics and vocabulary games.

In his second book, "In Castilian," he continues with his style and content features. "I ask for peace and the word" is a short book and, in a sense, the most tenuous of all his works. In his third work of this stage, poetic quality improves. Many poems are dedicated to singing the lands of Spain (regions, towns, rivers...). He also dedicates poems to Spanish cultural figures (Cervantes, Velázquez, Unamuno...). There is a tendency to purge, where condensation coexists with considerable style. Irony appears, along with a greater presence of popular lyricism, from which some forms continue to coexist with metrics like sonnets and free verse. Sometimes, he uses traditional ditties and verses of previous writers (Quevedo, Manrique, Machado, Darío...). Otero's evolution from the 1940s until the end of this stage mirrors that of other 20th-century poets like Machado, Lorca, Alberti, and Miguel Hernández: a journey from self to us, from the personal to the collective.