Spanish Poets of the 20th Century: Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Alonso

Federico García Lorca

García Lorca's work expresses his personality: an intense vitality that contrasts with the harrowing shadow of death. Topics include a passion for life, for love, and for freedom in conflict with a repressive society or tragic fate. The presence of frustration, loneliness, and death develops on a personal and social level. In his dramas, the characters are confronted with forces that suppress natural instincts, passions, hopes, and desires.

Stages of García Lorca's Work

• First Stage: Training and assimilation of different currents, including traditional and popular art and high culture. This includes youthful works, songs, and poems of flamenco singing. Gypsy Ballads portrays the marginalization of those facing social and moral standards, beset by a tragic destiny of loneliness, frustration, and death.
• Second Stage: New ethical and social concerns reflect a personal and aesthetic crisis. New forms of expression include visionary, surrealist imagery, and the use of free verse. Key works include Poet in New York, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Divan del Tamarit, and Sonnets of Dark Love.

Luis Cernuda

All of Cernuda's work raises the romantic conflict between reality and desire; that is, between personal aspirations and the petty world and its limits. This conflict creates feelings of loneliness, longing, and a desire for fulfillment in love. Formally, he rejects excessive ornamentation in favor of a more natural and colloquial language.

Reality and Desire is the title under which all his poetry is included.

Stages of Luis Cernuda's Work

• Initial Stage (until 1928): The search for his personal tone is influenced by pure and classical poetry. Key works: Perfil del aire, Égloga, elegía, oda.
• Surrealist Stage (from 1929 to 1936): Los placeres prohibidos, Donde habite el olvido, and Invocaciones, are books that address his intimate concerns.
• Stage of the Civil War: Las nubes (1937-1940).
• Stage of Exile (after the Civil War): Loneliness, bitterness, nostalgia, and exile. Key works: Desolación de la Quimera, Ocnos.

Vicente Aleixandre

Aleixandre understood poetry as communication and communion. Surrealism exerted a great influence on him, particularly the use of visionary images. We distinguish three poetic cycles:

• Physical Cycle: Evolution from pure poetry, with Ámbito. This is followed by a surrealist stage, with Espadas como labios and La destrucción o el amor, which leads to an existential tone in Sombra del Paraíso (1944).
• Humanist Cycle: A more simple poetry with a reflective tone, focusing on humans, with a positive vision of solidarity in Historia del Corazón (1954).
• Metaphysical Cycle (in senectute): Hermetic poetry that explores his own conscience and the meaning of life. Key works: Poemas de la consumación (1968) and Diálogos del conocimiento (1974).

Dámaso Alonso

Alonso's attitude as a poet developed especially in post-war Spain.

• Poetry Before the Civil War: He wrote pure poems: Poemillas de la ciudad (1921), a neo-Romantic, post-modernist work influenced by Juan Ramón Jiménez, but incorporating a neopopularist line.
• Poetry After the Civil War: His poetry of this period makes him the exponent of uprooted poetry. The existential poetry of Hijos de la ira (1944) is a protest against a meaningless world, ruled by chaos and cruelty. The poet is steeped in anxiety before a God who does not respond. Along with Vicente Aleixandre, he wrote Sombra del paraíso. Surrealism served to express that world without meaning. Oscura noticia (1944) expresses his dismay in religious sonnets or blank verse.