Generation of '27

Source in Seville dedicated to the poets of the generation of 27.

The generation of 27 refers to a group of Spanish writers and poets of the xx century which became known on the cultural scene around 1927, on the occasion of the tribute to Luis de Góngora organized that year by José María Romero Martínez at the Ateneo de Sevilla to commemorate the third centenary of the death of the author of the Golden Age, and as a relief of the generation of 98 and noucentismo.

On the concept of «generation»

The concept and name of generational group was already questioned by one of its members, Pedro Salinas, arguing that its members do not meet the criteria that Julius Peterson gave to the historiographical concept of «generation»:

• Birth in years not distant;
• Similar intellectual training;
• Personal relations;
• Participation in collective acts of their own;
• Existence of a "generational environment" that brings together their wills;
• Pre of a "guide";
• Common style traits (“generational language”);
• Ankylosing of the previous generation.

It is true that the birth of the majority is situated in a period that does not exceed 17 years, but not all the authors born then have been considered members of the group. The chosen ones coincide in a solid university education and in the consideration of Juan Ramón Jiménez as a reference poet. The existence of a "generational language" is also questioned, since, although all exercised aesthetics of the artistic avant-garde, they did not renounce the cultivated literary tradition of the Golden Age or the popular one, and evolving from neopopularism to surrealism..^{[citation required]}

Although the act of vindication in the Ateneo de Sevilla of the second period of Luis de Góngora could be considered a "generational event", the so-called culterana, rejected by the official literary critics, did not rise firmly against previous generations, nor these were in a state of stagnation; Quite to the contrary, they constitute a "cumulative" generation that assumes the achievements of the previous ones, and all these generations of 1998, 14 and 27, those that make up the so-called Silver Age of Spanish literature, basically reacted against a alone: the nineteenth century, identified with the false turnismo of parties and the monarchic Restoration, against which Krausism, the Free Institution of Education and regenerationism also rose, currents of which they feel they are heirs. As for whether there were personal relationships between them, there were, even deep friendships, at least among those who lived in the same area and frequented places like the Student Residence, where they came into contact with the artistic and scientific vanguards, and the Centro of Historical Studies, where they assimilated Hispanic cultural traditions, as well as in the newsrooms of magazines such as La Gaceta Literaria, Cruz y Raya, Revista de Occidente, Litoral, Verso y Prosa, Caballo Verde para la Poesía and Octubre among others, which makes them have a collective conscience united by experiences common and proper defined at the end by the positive of the Republic and the negative of the Civil War and the foreign and internal exiles.

Consequently, the critics affirm that it is a "generational group", a "constellation" or "promotion" of authors, despite which the designation of the generation of '27 has ended up being accepted, despite the existence of other proposals such as: «Guillén-Lorca generation»; "generation of 1925" (arithmetic mean of the date of publication of the first book by each author); «generation of the vanguards»; "friendship generation"; "generation of the dictatorship"; "generation of the Republic", etc.

Background to the generation of 27

The previous literary group, which succeeded the modernists and the Generation of '98, was characterized by its clear European orientation and its conception of art as an area separated from the social and the political; it was called noucentisme or Generation of 14. And all these previous groups came to coincide temporarily with the artistic movements called Vanguards that developed in Europe since 1909 and that break both with the theme and with the expressive techniques of romanticism and realism and their successors, post-romantic aesthetics. The avant-garde are attracted by technological advances and their possibilities, giving rise to the current of futurism, others explore reality leading to its decomposition, like the cubists; others substitute reality for the dream world, like the surrealists... This temporal coincidence, and the characteristics of the avant-garde movement, made the members of the noucentista group see in them the commitment to an art product of a playful and free act, the result of the intellectual and expressive capacity of the artist, which attracts them so much.

The fundamental features of this literary movement are two: the expression of the subjective, which is why they are characterized by the use of metaphor; and the conceptual precision, which reveals the solid intellectual formation of the members of this group. Given their fundamental features, it is not surprising that the most representative literary genres of these writers are poetry and essays, which are disseminated mainly through specialized newspapers and magazines (an example is the Seville magazine Grecia —founded by Isaac del Vando-Villar and Adriano del Valle, which operated between 1918-1920—, which in 1919 received the contributions of ultraist poets.). Despite this, there are some other representatives of the novel within Noucentisme, who opted for subjectivism and the renewal initiated by the Generation of '98, manipulating situations to be able to express their opinion on the most diverse topics.

History

In this situation of continuous renewal and social and political changes, young writers begin to appear, mostly poets, with their own characteristics that are difficult to fit into existing groups, but they are coming together in some key places: they come into contact with the Spanish literary tradition through the Center for Historical Studies and with the artistic and cultural vanguards through the activities of the Student Residence.

They also attend the newsrooms of some common publications such as Revista de Occidente directed by José Ortega y Gasset or La Gaceta Literaria (directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero), but also in others such as: Litoral (Málaga, 1926, printed by Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados); Verse and Prose (which comes from the Literary Supplement of the Murcian newspaper La Verdad -1923 to 1925-, which was maintained by the editor José Ballester Nicolás and Juan Guerrero Ruiz. Murcia, 1927, directed by Juan Guerrero Ruiz and Jorge Guillén); Noon (Seville); Meseta (from Valladolid); Cruz y Raya (directed by José Bergamín, Madrid, 1933); Carmen (created by Gerardo Diego in Santander in 1927, which had a festive supplement called Lola); Octubre (magazine directed by Rafael Alberti) and Caballo Verde for poetry (Madrid, 1935. Directed by Pablo Neruda).

Despite everything, this group is characterized by the fact that each of its members has such a marked personality that they are capable of transforming the influences or lessons of any model into their own personalized substance totally different from that of the other members of the group. For this reason, one cannot speak of a community of style or of a school among them. That is why there are many authors who prefer to refer to them as the "group of 27".

Poets of the generation of 27

Photography	Name	Date	Remarkable works
	Pedro Salinas	1891-1951	The voice to you due
	Adriano del Valle	1895-1957	Sonnets to Italy
	Manuel Altolaguirre	1905-1959	Escarmiento
	Juan José Domenchina	1898-1959	The Interrogations of Silence
	Federico García Lorca	1898-1936	Romancero Gitano
	Emilio Prados	1899-1962	Six Estancias
	Luis Cernuda	1902-1963	Reality and desire
	Jorge Guillén	1893-1984
	Vicente Aleixandre	1898-1984
	Gerardo Diego	1896-1987
	Damaso Alonso	1898-1990
	Rafael Alberti	1902-1999
	Pedro García Cabrera	1905-1981
	León Felipe - Partly included	1884-1968
	José Moreno Villa - Partly included	1887-1955
	Fernando Villalón - Partly included	1881-1930
	Max Aub - Partially Included	1903-1972
	Joaquín Romero Murube - Partly included	1904-1969
	Miguel Hernández - Partially Included	1910-1942

This group is so closed and narrow that the critic José-Carlos Mainer mocked them by calling them the "SL generation" (limited company) to insist precisely on the canonical immobility of this group of poets.

Authors forgotten by critics should be taken into account, as is the case with many of the women in this group (most of them were part of the Lyceum Club Femenino), generally known as Las Sinsombrero due to the transgressive attitude of take off the hat, pretending to break the norm and metaphorically, in the absence of the piece that covers the head, release ideas and concerns. The name Sinsombrero was generated from a transmedia project created by Tània Balló Colell, Serrana Torres and Manuel Jiménez Núñez to make visible the women of the generation of 27. Based on an anecdote told by Maruja Mallo, they gave this name to the project and it ended up becoming in the way in which this group is popularly called.

The Hatless

Photography	Name	Artistic area
	Maria Zambrano	Scripture
	Concha Méndez-Cuesta
	María Teresa León
	Ernestina de Champourcín
	Rosa Chacel
	Josefina de la Torre
	Luisa Carnés
	Rosario de Velasco	Painting
	Marga Gil Roësset
	Margarita Manso
	Delhy Tejero
	Maruja Mallo
	Remedies Varo
	Angels

On the other hand, we must also include other artists whose career is more or less similar or closely related to that of the authors of '27, although for various reasons they were not as close to the group: Juan Larrea, Mauricio Bacarisse, Juan José Domenchina, José María Hinojosa, José Bergamín (who rather belongs to the Noucentismo or Generation of 14), Alejandro Casona or Juan Gil-Albert.

We can also keep in mind the call, by one of its members (José López Rubio), as ''Another generation of 27'', which is made up of the humorist disciples of the avant-garde Ramón Gómez de la Serna, among Those that we can highlight: Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Edgar Neville, Miguel Mihura and Antonio de Lara, "Tono", who became members of the editorial staff of La Codorniz after the national war.

But we must also take into account that not all the literary production of 27 is written in Spanish; There were authors belonging to this generation who wrote in other languages, such as Óscar Domínguez, in French, or in English, such as Felipe Alfau, and some foreign writers and artists who were important in this movement, such as Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges or Francis Picabia.

For all these reasons, the idea of considering the Generation of '27 as a strictly Madrid phenomenon is not very consistent. In fact, you can see the existence of other creative nuclei that were scattered throughout the national territory, although with a close relationship between them. Thus, the main nuclei were located in Seville (around the magazine Mediodía), Canarias (around the Gaceta de Arte) and Malaga (around the magazine Litoral) and in Murcia (around the magazine Verso y Prosa); without this implying that there was not also an important activity in Cantabria, Galicia, Catalonia and Valladolid.

The Generation of '27 in other artistic expressions

Monument to Gerardo Diego, on Pío Baroja Street, in front of Casa de Cantabria, Madrid.

Nor should we lose sight of the fact that some members of the group focused on artistic activities other than strictly literary ones, such as:

Cinema and Animation

• Luis Buñuel
• K-Hito

Painting and Sculpture

• Salvador Dalí
• Angels Santos Torroella
• Benjamin Palencia
• Gregorio Prieto
• Manuel Ángeles Ortiz
• Ramón Gaya
• Gabriel García Maroto

or Rodolfo Halffter and Jesús Bal y Gay, composers and the latter also a musicologist, who belonged to the so-called Group of Eight, a name by which the correlate of the literary Generation of '27 is usually called in music and was made up of: the aforementioned Bal y Gay, the Halffters, who were Ernesto and Rodolfo, Juan José Mantecón, Julián Bautista, Fernando Remacha, Rosa García Ascot, Salvador Bacarisse and Gustavo Pittaluga, not being able to stop naming more or less marginal musicians like Gustavo Durán.

In Catalonia there is the so-called Catalan group, which made its presentation in 1931 under the name Group of Independent Catalan Artists made up of Roberto Gerhard, Baltasar Samper, Manuel Blancafort, Ricardo Lamote de Grignon, Eduardo Toldrá and Federico Mompou.

In other fields, such as architecture, it is worth mentioning the so-called Generation of 25 architects. Although some authors have proposed calling it the Generation of '27 as well, to unite it with this, they are two groups with clear differences between them. According to one of the most complete studies on these architects to date (Carlos Arniches and Martín Domínguez, architects of the Generation of 25. Madrid: Mairea), Fernando García Mercadal, Juan de Zavala, and, Manuel Sánchez Arcas, Luis Lacasa, Rafael Bergamín (brother of the essayist and poet José Bergamín), Luis Blanco Soler, Miguel de los Santos, Agustín Aguirre, Casto Fernández Shaw, Eduardo Figueroa, Carlos Arniches Moltó and Martín Domínguez Esteban. According to said study Teodoro de Anasagasti is one of the teachers of that generation, key to understanding the essence of the group and what makes it different, and Luis Gutiérrez Soto, younger than the rest, does not fulfill the values that said generation imposed on himself. Others, such as José de Aspiroz, José Borobio, Manuel Muñoz Casayús, Fernando Salvador, Vicente Eced, Bernardo Giner de los Ríos or Raimundo Durán Reynals are considered peripheral.

The currents of 27

Actually, the so-called generation of '27 was a little homogeneous group; they have usually been ordered in pairs or in trios. For example

• The poets of neopopularism or neopopularists: Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca, within a payroll that was particularly well nurtured, try to approach the poetry of Gil Vicente and the Romancero, or the lyric cancioneril, looking for popular sources and in the folklore of the traditional lyric; something of it also exists in the approximation that Gerardo Diego made, after his stage creates

• On the other hand, there are two professors of Hispanic philology who share common interests and who were even friends and had very similar trajectories, since not in vain his poetics is fundamentally affirmative and optimistic; it is Jorge Guillén, whose poetic work is collected under the title. Air our and is marked by pure poetry to the Paul Valéry and formed by five books (Quantum, Clamor, Homenage, ...and other poems and Final), and Pedro Salinas, the great poet of love of 27. Both of them are also authors of important literary criticism books: the first of all for Language and poetry (1962) and the second by Spanish literature. 20th century (1940) and Jorge Manrique or tradition and originality (1947), among others.

• The surreal group is more nourished. Already the novecentist Ramon Gomez de la Serna had revolutionized the metaphor with his greeceries, many of them already surrealists. Louis Aragón comes to give lectures to the Student Residence and the writers of 27 quickly assimilate the techniques of the visionary image and the verse, which renew and deeply enrich the poetic language of Spanish literature, as had already been done by the collage based on the dioistic technique of the found object. Outside of the cinema and surrealist painting of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, the nobel prize Vicente Aleixandre, surely the most original, since, according to Cernuda, "his verse is not like anything", and the one who has come to be the most influential poet of the generation during the last half of the centuryXX., already quoted Luis Cernuda. However, there were other poets of 27 who noticed the surreal impact and who have stages in their evolution marked by this aesthetic: Rafael Alberti, for example, composed the last section of About angels and Sermons and dwellings in surrealist verse and Federico García Lorca assimilated its impact Llanto by Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Poet in New York and Sonnets of Dark Love. Surrealism in Juan Larrea is fundamental and a surreal stage has, for example, José María Hinojosa with his The Flower of California (with accent on i) and Emilio Prados. These are the last two, together with Vicente Aleixandre, whose childhood would happen in Malaga, García Lorca, who spent long stays on the Malaga coast, José Moreno Villa (adscribable rather than Novecentismo) and Manuel Altolaguirre, who constitute the so-called group of Malaga, formed around a series of magazines edited by the group, being Litoral the most important, as well as its collection of poetic books. Surrealists are also the three parts of Residence on the ground published by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for these years in Spain and who know well his friends of 27.

• Dámaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego constitute the core of those who remained in Spain after the Civil War, more or less integrated into the Franco regime. The latter made a long poetic trajectory where it combined tradition and avant-garde, very varied in its theme, from the tore to music and religious concerns, the landscape and the existential contents, being also the author of the most famous anthology of Generation 27 in two different versions: Spanish poetry. Anthology (1915-1931) (1932 and 1934). Others who remained, became teachers and guides of a whole new generation of poets, such as Vicente Aleixandre, or opted for inner exile, such as Juan Gil-Albert.

• The Malagueño group is composed of Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados and José María Hinojosa, considered capriciously "small poets" of this promotion.

• Homoeroticism or homosexuality is also an occasional theme, as can be seen in the work of Luis Cernuda, Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados or Juan Gil-Albert, as well as in the work of the painter Gregorio Prieto.

Aesthetics

In the authors of 1927, the tendency to balance, to synthesis between opposite poles, is very significant, even within the same author:

Between the intellectual and the sentimental. The emotion tends to be endorsed by the intellect. They prefer intelligence, feeling and sensitivity to intellectualism, sentimentalism and sensitivity (Bergamín).

It is very well observed in Salinas.

Between a romantic conception of art (outburst, inspiration) and a classical conception (rigorous effort, discipline, perfection). Lorca said that if he was a poet "by the grace of God (or the devil)" he was no less so "by the grace of technique and effort."

Between aesthetic purity and human authenticity, between pure poetry (art for art's sake; desire for beauty) and authentic, human poetry, concerned with man's problems (more common after the war: Guillén, Aleixandre...).

Between art for minorities and majorities. Hermeticism and clarity alternate, the cultured and the popular (Lorca, Alberti, Diego). There is a shift from "I" to "we." "The poet sings for everyone," Aleixandre would say.

Between the universal and the Spanish, between the influences of contemporary European poetry (surrealism) and the best Spanish poetry of all time. They feel great attraction for popular Spanish poetry: songbooks, ballads...

Between tradition and renewal. They feel close to the avant-garde (Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre and Cernuda have surrealist books; Gerardo Diego, creationists); close to the previous generation (they admire Juan Ramón Jiménez, Unamuno, the Machados, Rubén Darío...); they admire Bécquer from the 19th century (Alberti: "Homage to Bécquer", Cernuda: "Donde habite el olvido", Jorge Guillén, a study in his Language and poetry (1962)...); They feel genuine fervor for the classics: Manrique (Jorge Manrique, tradition and originality by Pedro Salinas), Garcilaso (Eclogue, Elegy, Ode by Luis Cernuda; La voz due to you, by Pedro Salinas), Juan de la Cruz (Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dalí; Poems of Dark Love by Federico García Lorca), Luis de León, Francisco de Quevedo (Jorge Guillén) Lope de Vega (especially in Gerardo Diego, but Lorca also represented three of his works with his group from La Barraca, and played the shadow role in El caballero de Olmedo), Pedro Calderón de la Barca (an attempt is being made to bring his allegorical theater back into fashion by writing sacramental plays: Rafael Alberti and his The Uninhabited Man) and, above all, Luis de Góngora (Fable of Equis y Zeda by Gerardo Diego; Poema del agua by Manuel Altolaguirre; Cal y canto by Rafael Alberti; Insecure Solitude by Federico Garcia Lorca). And forgotten classics such as Francisco de Aldana (to whom Cernuda dedicates a critical study and admired allusions in his poems) are revived. On the other hand, the approach to the human and the social by poets such as Rafael Alberti and the Chilean Pablo Neruda is carried out through the concept of impure poetry that the latter acclimatizes through his Spanish magazine Caballo verde para poetry (1935) and Rafael Alberti's magazine October. Rafael Alberti and the "epigone of 27" Miguel Hernández will write numerous combat poems during the Civil War.

Stages

• (a) Until 1927: This is a time of tanteo; they begin with just becquerian or modernist tones (Lorca), and they will soon be influenced by dehumanized vanguards: Pedro Salinas becomes futurist in Preagios, Surely random. and Fable and sign; Gerardo Diego Creationist (Foam Manual, Fábula de Equis y Zeda); Jorge Guillén assimilates Paul Valéry's aseptic pure poetry. Some feel a desire for formal perfection, so they look for the classics (Góngora, mainly -Cal and singingAlberti and Water Poem, from Altolaguirre-, but also others: Garcilaso, Lope de Vega..., and others (Lorca, Alberti, Diego) for the popular inspiration of the Old Romancero -Gypsy Romancere of Lorca- and singers of Gil Vicente and Neopopularism: The lover and The dawn of the alheliAlberti.
• (b) From 1927 to the Civil War: They evolve by acquiring their own personality and tending to rehumanization. Highlights the influence of surrealism and Pablo Neruda, with his magazine Green horse for poetry, which promotes a poetic rehumanization (" impure poetry", the flame). Surrealism is also used as a procedure for freeing itself from repression and injustice, for example in The Prohibited Placeres of Luis Cernuda and Poet in New York from Lorca.
• (c) After the Civil War: The group is surrounded by the death of Lorca and the exile of the others, who will have in exile an important subject, except three that stayed: Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso and Vicente Aleixandre; these two last cultivate the so-called uprooted (existential) poetry and Aleixandre (and also Gil-Albert) will live in a certain way the so-called inner exile, constituating poet. They are frequent themes Spain, the lost homeland, etc.

Institutions

Most of these authors, mainly lyrical, came into contact with the literary tradition (Siglo de Oro, Ballads, Gil Vicente songbooks, Arabic poetry) through the Center for Historical Studies directed by the father of Spanish philology, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and with the avant-garde through travel, the dissemination carried out by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and other noucentistas and, above all, the activities and conferences programmed by the Student Residence, an institution inspired by the Krausism of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and directed by Alberto Jiménez Fraud, which organized scientific conferences by important Spanish and foreign figures (Albert Einstein, Howard Carter, Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, Le Corbusier, Keynes, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, for example) and the avant-garde aesthetics (Louis Aragon, Max Jacob), among others (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Paul Valéry, Ígor Stravinski, Paul Claudel, Wolfgang Köhler, Herbert Geo rge Wells...), in addition to having a film club and a day dedicated to concerts. He also edited a magazine, Residencia (1926-1934).

Payroll

Members of the generation of '27, in chronological order:

Poetic evolution of the Generation of 27

You cannot unify the poetry of this generation, not even in the particular case of each poet who is integrated into it. But you can find in all of them a desire for renewal, an overcoming of the "isms" that arose in previous times, which meant an overcoming of the iconoclastic and destructive spirit that characterized them. This does not prevent them from breaking with academicism, and presenting, at certain times, a certain irrationality in the use of their metaphors and images, which allows them to maintain their markedly original and independent spirit, without ties to anything.

Different stages can be distinguished in the poetry of this group, some authors speak of two, while others prefer to establish three:

• Until 1927. This first stage is characterized by the influence of the first avant-garde, which gives them priority to aesthetic achievements, with great use of the free verse. Thus, at this stage there are mixed traits of the pure and conceptual poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, traits of the previous avant-garde, and, finally, traits from the traditional poetry collected in songs, romances, which exerted influence on them, while also they were influenced by classic authors such as Góngora.

• From 1927 to the Civil War (1936). This stage is mainly characterized by a certain concern for the human being and certain social situations in which it is immersed. It can be said that a process of rehumanization begins, which coincides with the irruption of Surrealism; which gives rise to the appearance in the poetry of beautiful, although disturbing images, on many occasions similar to the inflammatory ones.

• After the War (1939). The war conflict caused by Franco's coup led to the dispersion of the group. Most of them were exiled, as was the case of Rafael Alberti, Max Aub, Luisa Carnés, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Concha Méndez, Pedro Salinas and María Zambrano, to mention just a few examples; others were killed, as happened with Federico García Lorca, or perished in the Francoist prisons, such as Miguel Hernández; and, lastly, some like Dámasand This scattering gives rise to different themes. Thus, while those who live exile in the ordinary focus on their experience as exiles and the feelings that provoke them (although they hosted other themes in their compositions), those who remained in the country focused on existential distress the most important theme of their works.

We highlight among the authors:

Pedro Salinas

Born in Madrid, he taught literature at various universities. Influenced by the work of Juan Ramón Jiménez, he cultivates pure poetry. Like Juan Ramón, he tries to enter into the hidden essence of things, with an intellectualized poetry, apparently simple, that he uses as a channel the seven-syllable verse and the hendecasyllable without rhymes. His work is divided into three stages:

• 1.a stage: mixes pure poetry and futuristic themes (bombilla, car, typewriter...). They emphasize: Preagios,Surely random. and Fable and sign.
• 2.a stage: it is the most important. Pay attention to the intimate world and love as a joyful experience, in the unexpressed person of the American student Katherine R. Whitmore. Predominates colloquial dictation, conceptual language, triplets of terms and insistence on pronouns. It is characteristic the short verse heptasylabo and silvas (a verse composed of endecasylabos and heptasylabos, without rhyme). They emphasize:
  • The voice to you due, extract the title of the III Garcilaso. Love appears essential in the pronouns me and you to refer to your-yo couple, whose center is the woman.
  • Reason for lovecontinuation of the previous book, where the rationalization of the loving process continues.
  • Long lamentHe takes his title from a verse of the Rimas of Bécquer, a poem about the desamor and death of love, which lives with resignation and gratitude of the lived.
• 3.a stage: written already in America. The contemplated alludes to the sea that is his interlocutor. All clearer.anguish caused by contemporary technological civilization and the horrors of the Civil War and the 2nd World War, and TrustThat closes his poetic work.

Jorge Guillén

He was born in Valladolid. He went into exile in the United States and was, like his friend Pedro Salinas, with whom he had a long correspondence, a professor of Spanish literature. He returned after Franco's death and obtained the Cervantes prize. His singularity resides in having remained faithful to the ideal of pure poetry, and he offered an optimistic and serene vision of the world, thus establishing himself as the antithesis of Vicente Aleixandre's cosmological pessimism.

All his work is grouped under the general title of Aire Nuestro, which includes five books: Cántico, Clamor, Homage , ...And other poems and Final. His language is very elaborate, in search of the maximum and conciseness; he prefers the short verse and the hendecasyllable. His work is the result of a rigorous selection process (of the word), in which the accessory is suppressed through ellipsis to communicate the essential idea or feeling, leaving a verse that is often broken by overlapping.

His themes are the jubilant affirmation of being; fullness, the time that passes and invites you to enjoy life; chance and chaos, which produce insecurity or suffering.

Gerardo Diego

He was born in Santander and held the chair of Literature at a High School in Soria. He received the National Prize for Literature, together with Rafael Alberti, and that of Cervantes. His poetry develops in parallel in two ways: the traditional and the avant-garde (almost always creationist). The creationist side of him includes: Image , Manual de Espumas and Fábula de Equis y Zeda . From his traditional aesthetics we highlight: Versos Humanos , Soria and Alondra de Verdad , a collection of sonnets, a metrical grouping that, like the tenth, dominate. The themes of this second aspect are: love, God, music, nature, bulls, shape, iconography, beauty...

Damaso Alonso

He was born in Madrid, directed the RAE. Three vocations merged in him: that of a poet, that of a linguist and that of a literary critic, one of the most important figures in stylistics. Among his books on literature, La lengua poetica de Góngora and a series of admirable studies on modern lyricists (from Bécquer to the writers of his time) that constitute Contemporary Spanish Poets stand out. He edited the works of Góngora and considered himself within 1927 only as a critic, and as a poet rather within the First post-war generation, in what he himself called uprooted poetry, since the 1936 war made him hate purity advocated by Juan Ramón Jiménez that at first he had tried to reproduce with his first lyrical attempts. Along with Vicente Aleixandre, he was the only author of 27 who remained in Spain, both in a so-called internal exile. His most important works are located in the postwar period, highlighting Sons of Wrath (1944), a book highly influenced by Existentialism and by the biblical poetry of penitential Psalms, whose Semantic parallelism imitates through a particular use of free verse and verse. It is one of the founding books of the post-war poetic current known as uprooted poetry, together with Shadow of Paradise by Vicente Aleixandre, published that same year.

Vicente Aleixandre

A Sevillian, his friendship with Dámaso Alonso awakened his poetic vocation. In 1935, his book Destruction or Love obtained the National Literature Award. He is elected a member of the RAE. And in 1977 he gets the Nobel Prize.

Most of his production follows in the footsteps of Surrealism and becomes the great international poet of this aesthetic; his vision is gloomy, dramatic, pessimistic. He uses the verse and the visionary image in Swords as lips and Destruction or love , the first stage of his evolution that defines himself in solidarity with matter, with nature, with the cosmos. It evolves towards a «poetry of communication», of solidarity with man, in line with the prevailing social tendency in the lyric of the 50s. Shadow of paradise (1944), inaugurated together with Hijos de la ira by Dámaso Alonso, also from that year, the trend of uprooted postwar poetry. With History of the heart he began a solidarity poetry. And it ends with his great trilogy de senectute: Poems of Consummation, Dialogues of Knowledge and En gran noche, in which he returns to a peculiar surrealism, with deep philosophical implications and conceptualist hints.

Federico García Lorca

He was born in Granada in 1898. His studies in Letters and Law did not interest him as much as music; he was a close friend of Manuel de Falla, from whom he later distanced himself. He settled in the Student Residence, where he lived with numerous artists (Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel in particular). After living for a while in New York, he returned to Spain and in 1932 founded La Barraca, a university theater group with which he toured Spain representing classic plays. He participates in certain leftist public activities and is assassinated by nationalists in Viznar (Granada). His assassination produced great worldwide commotion.

In Lorca's work, the cultured and the popular, the traditional and the avant-garde come together. He knew the traditional songbooks and the oral poetry of the Andalusian people. His poetics affirms that there are three types of poetry: that of the Muse (that of intelligence and culture, whose prototype poet is Góngora); that of the Angel (that of inspiration, whose type poet is Bécquer) and that of the Goblin (which is based on pain and damage); the first two come from without and the last from within: the latter is his. That is why his theme was frustration in two aspects, the ontological and the social; and he develops it in a rich poetic style, with one of the most complex symbolic systems and the most brilliant imagery in Spanish literature, made up of elements drawn above all from three sources: popular superstition, Shakespeare and the Bible. He is obsessed with themes such as loneliness or tragic destiny, and the struggle of marginalized beings (the homosexual, the woman, the child, the deformed, the impotent old man, the spinster, the sterile, the gypsy, the black...) against an oppressive society based on conventions. His work is divided into two stages, a neo-popularist one and another in which he approaches Surrealism in which he tries to ingratiate himself with his non-assumed homosexuality through pansexualism.

The following stand out from the first stage:

• Poema del cante jondo, which is part of the neopopularist line of the G. 27 and uses several short poems that can be read as independent poems or as fragments of a long chained one. The broken foot is used.
• Gypsy Romancere, in the same neo-popularist line, is composed of 18 romances. The protagonist is the gypsy that symbolizes pure and innocent man, enmity with social laws and norms, represented by the Guardia Civil (his antagonist).

The following stand out from the second:

• Poet in New YorkThe poet drowns in that world that makes man a piece of a great gear. With clearly surreal procedures such as the visionary image and the verse, Lorca raises the shout in full Crack of 29 and his protest against that inhuman hive; he assumes the voice of the blacks as he used to assume that of the marginalized gypsies of his tragic Andalusia.
• Llanto by Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, plant composed of the death of a bullfighter friend of yours.
• Dark love sonnets, published posters, are the expression of dramatic homosexual eroticism.

Rafael Alberti

From Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz). With his family he moved to Madrid. He drops out of high school and dedicates himself to painting. He joined the communist party and had an active political participation in the war. At the end of this he went into exile in Argentina. Once democracy is restored, he returns, and he will be awarded the Cervantes Prize.

The popular and the cultured, the bare and the baroque, the traditional and the frantically new merge. His earliest book, Sailor on land , is part of a line of neopopularism. They are songs that evoke a lost paradise, which the poet identifies with the Cádiz of his childhood, and the sea, the salt flats, the most jubilant moments of it. They are followed by El alba de alhelí and Cal y canto, of the most difficult neogongorismo or culteranismo. In 1929 he published his masterpiece, About Angels , induced by a deep crisis of loss of faith; it is a book in three parts; the first two are of Becquerian inspiration; the last one already uses a full surrealism in which it unleashes the verse. He uses symbols like angels, ghosts, and goblins. Books from his second period, highlights The poet on the street , committed literature. Other works, already in exile he will publish Ballads and songs from Paraná .

Luis Cernuda

Born in Seville, he was a student of Pedro Salinas and a professor at various European and American universities. He gathered his poetic work under the general title of Reality and Desire, a collection of books to which they belong: Air Profile, Eclogue, Elegy, Ode, The forbidden pleasures, Where oblivion dwells, A river, a love, and The clouds, already in exile, Desolation of the chimera. His work as a literary critic and essayist is also important, with the two volumes of Poetry and Literature , etc.

Her poetry shies away from formal emphasis, overly marked rhythms, strophism and metaphor in search of the indefinable, the aerial. That is why he rejects forms as imposted as the sonnet and the rhyme and, when he uses any, it is the assonance, which offers him more freedom. It focuses on the human experience, but drives away what is more specific and proper, shuns his self so that the reader can identify with the poet's experience rather than with the poet himself. He sings of the clash between desire and reality, which leaves the poet only the elegiac consolation of memory or a few moments, which he calls chords, of an ode or celebration of timeless joy.

Historiography on 27

Reconstructing the living memory of what has come to be called the Silver Age and specifically the Generation of '27 requires reading a series of memoirs written by various authors more or less linked to this promotion. The Lost Grove, by Rafael Alberti, for example. This is also the case of Pablo Neruda, who at that time came to Madrid and reinforced the Surrealist group with some of his contributions, in particular with the publication of his book Residencia en la tierra I y II and which in his two memoirs, I confess that I have lived and To do I was born, gave testimony and news about the group's activities during those years and the subsequent exile, particularly about Lorca and Alberti. Los encuentros , by Vicente Aleixandre, narrates the first times he saw each of the relevant figures of the generation; My last breath, by Luis Buñuel, originally published in French, includes numerous anecdotes about the poets of '27; Spoken Memories, Armed Memories (2018) by Concha Méndez; Life in clear. Autobiography (1944) by José Moreno Villa, History of a book, by Luis Cernuda, the letters of each author, etc.

The Hatless

Las Sinsombrero is an initiative to rescue the memory of the women members of the Generation of 27, as well as other women who with their work, their actions and their courage were and are fundamental to understanding the culture and history of a country that never protected them.

Fonts

• Mainer, José-Carlos, The Silver Age (1902–1939). Rehearsal of interpretation of a cultural process. Madrid: Chair, 1983.
• Diez de Reven, Francisco Javier, Critical Overview of Generation 27Madrid, Castalia, 1987.
• Alonso, Damaso, "A poetic generation (1920-1936)", Contemporary Spanish Poets, Madrid, Gredos, 1965, pp. 155-177.
• Anderson, A., Twenty-seven on trial fabric, Madrid, Gredos, 2006.
• Diego, Gerardo, Anthology of Gerardo Diego. Contemporary Spanish Poetry, Ed. de A. Soria Olmedo, Madrid, Taurus, 1991.
• Cano, José Luis, The Poetry of the 27th Generation, Madrid, Guadarrama, 1970.
• González Muela, Joaquín, «The poetic language of the Guillén-Lorca generation. » Insula. Madrid, 1954.
• González Muela, Joaquín y Rozas, Juan Manuel, The generation of 27. Study and anthology, Madrid, Istmo, 1986, 30 ed.
• Gullón, Ricardo, "The poetic generation of 1925", Invention of 98 and other tests, Madrid, Gredos, 1969, pp. 126-161.
• Merlo, Pepa, (2010), Fish on earth. Anthology of women around the Generation of 27Seville: Vandalia. José Manuel Lara Foundation.
• Rozas, Juan Manuel, The generation of 27 from within (Texts and documents), Madrid, Alcalá, 1974.
• Rozas, Juan Manuel, 27 as a generationSantander, La Isla de los Ratón, 1978.
• Torre, Guillermo de, European avant-garde literature, Ed. de J. M. Barrera López, Sevilla, Renacimiento, 2001.
• Ilie, Paul, The Spanish Surrealists, Madrid, Taurus, 1972.
• Geist, A. L., The poetics of the generation of 27 and literary magazines: from the vanguard to the commitment (1918–1936), Barcelona, Labor, 1980.
• Cernuda, Luis, «Generation of 1925», Studies on contemporary Spanish poetry, Madrid, Guadarrama, 1957, pp. 181-196.
• Cirre, J. F., Form and spirit of a Spanish lyric (1920-1935)Mexico, Pan American Graphics, 1950.