Spanish Civil War Poets and Federico García Lorca Works

Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente Aleixandre: Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977. His themes include loving solidarity with creation and the human soul. His poetry often blends passion and destruction, landscape and love; surrealism is very marked. A shadow of existentialism appears with subtle twists. Aleixandre takes an anthropocentric position in the history of the heart.

Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda: He went into exile as a result of the Civil War and worked as a professor of Spanish language and literature in England, the USA, and Mexico, where he died. Much of his poetry shares common themes and was written before 1936; it was later expanded and revised in various editions, including significant editions in 1964. His work stresses love, the soldier's watch, sadness, pessimism and frustration.

Dámaso Alonso

Dámaso Alonso: The poet and literary critic was a university professor. He did not go into exile during the Civil War and held positions in Spanish academic institutions, including the Spanish Royal Academy. In 1944 he published Hijos de la ira, a transcendent book that reflects the painful experience suffered in war-torn Spain.

Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca was born in Granada and lived with his generation at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. He led the theater company La Barraca. In 1936, during the Civil War, he was killed. He is internationally known among authors of his generation.

His poetic works include Poema del cante jondo and the Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads). In Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías he wrote an elegy for his friend the bullfighter. After his trip to America he wrote Poet in New York.

Drama:

• Mariana Pineda recreates the figure of a woman who sews a liberal flag and is sentenced to death.
• Blood Wedding is a tragedy in which the groom marries an old love while his cousin Leonardo still loves the bride. The bride and Leonardo run away on a horse; the groom pursues them and a duel occurs in which both men die.
• Yerma revolves around a barren woman who desperately wants a child and ends up committing a fatal act against her husband.
• The House of Bernarda Alba is a rural tragedy that develops themes of oppression and the desire for freedom: after the husband dies, Bernarda orders eight years of mourning for her daughters. The household suffers intense sorrow; Adela, the youngest, hides a forbidden love and discovers passion in the loft of the house. The mother, Bernarda, shoots a gun; Adela is later found dead, with the official account presenting it as a suicide.
• Lorca also wrote farces and other theatrical pieces: farce for puppets such as Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Señá Rosita, actor farces such as Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden, and surreal theater like Así que pasen cinco años (When Five Years Pass).