Spanish Poets: Lorca, Alberti, Salinas, and Diego

Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca was an excellent poet and playwright. His works often explore the topics of love, frustration, and tragic destiny, featuring many marginalized people doomed to pain, loneliness, and death. His style is personal and bright, with plastic images, and his poetry is suggestive and dramatic. His work, in both senses of the word, is theatrical and tragic: theatrical because it is expressed through characters, and tragic because it reflects fatalism, presenting humans in a fight against an adverse fate. Along with tragic fate appear frustration and impossible desire. Notable works include Poet in New York and Gypsy Ballads. His theater is poetry that presents a stylized reality, posing a single theme: the confrontation between the individual and their ambiance. The conflict between the individual and society emerges as a social drama, resolved with the destruction of the individual and their dreams. Examples include If Five Years Pass and The Public (avant-garde), and Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba (tragic).

Lorca's poetic career can be divided into two stages:

• First stage (until 1928): Merges popular and high culture, tradition, and modernity. Gypsy Ballads exalts the dignity of the marginalized Roma, doomed to a tragic fate. It portrays a mythic Andalusia through a style that combines tradition and renewal.
• Second stage: Shows surrealist influence with bold, irrational images, reflecting an attitude of rebellion and protest, using free verse. Poet in New York reflects the poet's crisis, with the city symbolizing a materialistic, mechanized civilization. It combines the testimony of "the enslavement of man and machine" with the intimate subject of the poet's frustration.

Rafael Alberti

Rafael Alberti is known for his variety of themes and styles, his mastery of the art, and his prolific output, traits shared with Gerardo Diego. He was associated with Lorca because he combined traditional and avant-garde elements. He wrote poetry, prose, and drama. His poetry can be divided into four stages:

• Neopopularism: Sailor on Land, The Mistress, and The Dawn of the Wallflower. Features popular lyricism, nominal style, parallelism, lexical expressiveness, and simplicity.
• Avant-garde: Lime and Stone, About the Angels, and I Was a Fool and What I Have Seen Has Made Me Two Fools, a tribute to several silent film authors.

Pedro Salinas

Pedro Salinas wrote intellectual poetry, conceived as a dialogue between the poet and the world or the beloved. This dialogue leads him to the essence of things. His style is anti-rhetorical, using familiar, modern, everyday language, simple images, and a light rhythm with short verses, without rhyme or assonance.

• First stage: Avant-garde influence in Omens, Safe Chance, and Fable and Sign.
• Second stage: Love theme in The Voice Due to You, Love's Reason, and Long Regret. These works establish him as the great poet of love within the group. Love is seen as a prodigious strength that gives meaning to the world, a correspondence between the most essential and genuine aspects of lovers, you and me, beyond the superficial or anecdotal represented in society. The language is conceptual and dense, qualified by paradoxes and wordplay. It is an interior concept.
• Third stage: Works written in exile, such as The Contemplative and Confident. He also wrote avant-garde theater, stories, and numerous essays on literature.

Gerardo Diego

Gerardo Diego combines very different styles: avant-garde and classic, cultured and popular, traditional forms alongside free verse. His subjects often focus on his immediate world, experiences, emotions, and memories. Religious themes are also present. His avant-garde work is part of creationism. He unites tradition and creationism in Fable of X and Z, which reflects the enthusiasm for Góngora in 1927. His traditional work is very diverse in themes and forms, using sonnets, songs, and romances, and predominantly featuring compositions on love, religion, or landscape. Skylark of Truth is considered his masterpiece, where the sonnet achieves extraordinary perfection.