Spanish Poetry Movements: Avant-Garde to Social Commitment

Aesthetic Development in Spanish Poetry

Synthesis Features: Cutting-Edge and Tradition

Diversity of Aesthetic Trends

1. Spanish Avant-Garde Poetry: Ultraísmo and Creationism

• Influenced by topics like the city and enthusiasm for modern life.
• Characterized by poetic experimentation:
  • Crop image
  • Plastic and visual values
  • Suppression of rhyme and punctuation

Notable figures: Salinas, Navacerrada, Alberti.

2. Pure Poetry

• Poets seek substantive representation in the world.
• Reject sentimentality and the anecdotal.
• Tend to be sober and nominalist, stressing the importance of words, even isolated in verses.
• Preference for nouns.
• Predominant juxtapositions and short sentences, creating images through new partnerships.
• Predominant metric: regular, tenths, sonnets, lyres.

Notable figure: Jorge Guillén.

3. Neopopularismo

• Poets like García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Gerardo Diego created lyric poetry influenced by traditional and popular styles, reminiscent of Lope de Vega.
• Knowledge of these poems was aided by the work of the Centre for Historical Studies.
• Characteristics:
  • Traditional metrics
  • Verses of ballads
  • Colloquial short texts with refrains and repetitions

Notable works: Romance del Duero, Gerardo Diego's Songs.

4. Surrealism

• Themes: freedom, chance, the inner world of emotions, dreams, the instinctual, the mysterious, unusual, wonderful, love, sensitivity, eroticism, cruelty, injury, and death.
• Formal Resources: visionary imagery, irrationality, detached reference, lack of textual consistency; preferred spoken language, colloquial expressions, and free verse.
• Reasons: criticism of society and conventions, seeking release (personal, social, literary, emotional) and freedom of expression.

Notable works: On Alberti's Angels, Destruction or the Love of Aleixandre.

Neo-Romanticism and Return to Purity

Neo-romanticism emerged, with poetry returning to a sense of purity. Pablo Neruda's work shows a more direct language, as does Cernuda's Donde habite el olvido. The title itself is a line of romantic sensibility, reminiscent of Bécquer, sampling the root of all his poetry: excited or painful love, and the conflict between reality and desire.

5. Social Poetry

• From the proclamation of the 2nd Republic, poetry committed to the political situation developed, seen in poets like Alberti (in The Poet on the Street).

After 1939: The Civil War's Impact

The consequences of the Civil War were dramatic for literature and other aspects of life. The death of Lorca symbolized the brutality of the war. After the war ended, almost all of the '27 poets went into exile. Some of the most important works by Cernuda, Aleixandre, Alberti, and Salinas were yet to be written. Topics now included the uprooting of exile, longing for the motherland, and a sense of loss of a world.