Spanish Generation of '27 Poets: Style and Themes

The Spanish Generation of '27: Poets and Their Styles

The Generation of '27 was a group of influential Spanish poets who emerged in the 1920s. Here's a look at some of its key figures and their defining characteristics:

• Pedro Salinas

  Salinas's work primarily explores the theme of love, seeking the essence of life through formal beauty and intellect. His style incorporates paradoxes, metaphors, simple language, short lines with assonance, and a limited use of adjectives. "The Voice Due You."

• Jorge Guillén

  A follower of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Guillén is considered a pure poet and intellectual. His style is characterized by elaborate expression, concise wording, simple sentence structures, abundant exclamations, and classic short stanzas like the tenth, romance, or sonnet. "Song."

• Gerardo Diego

  A leading figure in creationism, Diego's work covers a wide range of topics (love, nature, music, religion) and blends modern and classic elements. He uses both free verse and traditional forms like sonnets and romances. "Manual of Foam."

• Vicente Aleixandre

  Aleixandre, a Nobel laureate, is known for his innovative use of metaphors, based on his own subjectivity. He pays great attention to vocabulary and its distribution, employs parallelism and anaphora, and favors free verse. "Shadow of Paradise."

• Rafael Alberti

  Alberti's style is diverse, encompassing traditional, folk, avant-garde, and cultivated elements. His themes range from angst to social poetry. He uses anaphoric figures of speech with color nuances, free verse, and surreal images. "Marinero en tierra."

Federico García Lorca

One of the most prominent figures of the Generation of '27, Lorca's style is highly creative, blending personal aesthetics with rooted customs. He merges cultured and popular elements, using symbols (moon, blood, water, horse, colors) to represent life, death, eroticism, and fertility. His work features evocative vocabulary, imagery, and avant-garde influences. Lorca's original conception of rhythm in verse combines romance, classic chorus, and other stanzas or verses. He explores themes like death and love as inevitable frustrations leading to tragedy, tormented by anxiety, a sense of incomprehension, loneliness, and frustrated passion. "Gypsy Ballads," "Poet in New York," and "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías."

Luis Cernuda

With a hypersensitive nature, Cernuda's style expresses dissatisfaction with life and the inability to achieve dreams due to a skeptical and conservative society. His predominant themes include love (joyful or painful), childhood, loneliness, the passage of time, and nature. He avoids sharp rhymes, uses free verse, and employs symbols and images. "Forbidden Pleasures," "Where Oblivion Dwells," and "Reality and Desire."