The Generation of 1927

It may happen that from time to time, a special group of poets, writers and artists would come together for a common cause and as a result their collective influence become far more important than those of other generations . The reason for this may be complex. It may be just a historical accident when for one reason or another, the circumstances are such that a special chemistry arises between and amongst the different members of the group who otherwise may be very different individuals. This happened in Spanish poetry. We have now what has been called  the Generation of 1927 or in Spanish Generación del 27. They are an influential group of Spanish  poets in the literary circles between 1923 to 1927 who came together because of a shared desire to experience and work on the Spanish poetic tradition by incorporating avant garde form and elements, looking both on the one hand backward and on the other forward. This group has also been called the "Generation of the Dictatorship" because many of their members had suffered physical and cultural attacks under the dictationship of General Franco who rose to power in the period of the Spanish Civil War which started in 1936. Their general sympathies were for the abolition of the monarchy in Spain and for the establishment of a republic . Hence they have also been called "Generation of the Republic". Because their leaders were Jorge Guillén (1893-1984) and Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) they are sometimes also called the  "Generation Guillén-Lorca" , Guillén being its oldest author, and Lorca its youngest. Sometimes they are called the "Generation of 1925"  because the average publishing date of the first book of each author is 1925. Because they advocated some pretty advanced ideas about art in general and poetry in particular, they are sometimes also called the  "Generation of Avant-Gardes".

This group had their first formal meeting in  Seville in 1927. The occasion was the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora (1561-1627). Góngora wrote in a style which has been called "culteranismo" or "gongorismo". It is characterized by the use of a great many words to suggest what was meant, but never directly what actually was meant. It plays on the ambiguity of the contexts of the words to create interest. He uses a very flowery language and invented many new words ( neologism) which previously never existed in Spanish, generally constructed or created from words with Latin or Greek roots. He also relies heavily on what has been called "hyperbaton" or an unusual or non-conventional word order as a rhetorical device to highlight the effect of certain other words e.g. by reversing the word order like placing the object before the verb or placing the adverb before the verb, the adjective before the noun etc. for emphasis. In this respect, Góngora borrowed heavily from Latin, which allows a rather loose syntactical structure, so that sometimes, the subject may be separated from the object, direct or indirect and sometimes, its verb, by very many other intervening phrases, subordinate clauses in parenthesis, but without the parenthesis marks to indicate that they are put in parenthesis. He sometimes also imitates the way the blacks or Moors in Spain speak or use words. His style was much criticized by his opponent, chiefly another baroque poet writing in the same period, Franciso de Quevedo (1580-1645), a very learned man who studied theology, Hebrew, Arab, Latin, Greek and Italian and was very much into courtly elegance, who advocated the contrary idea: what has been called "conceptismo" , aiming at clarity of expression, simplicity and elegance through using simple words, puns or word plays, so that one word may have multiple meanings in different contexts. 

It is difficult to generalize on the style of the group of poets whose main members may be argued to include about a dozen or so poets and writers namely Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), Felipe Alfau (1902-1999), Vincente Aleixandre (1898-1984), a Nobel prize winner, Manuel Altolaguirre who edited the Malaga review Litoral with Emilio Prados (1899-1962), Amado Alonso (1897-1952), Dámaso Alonso (1898-1990), Pedro Salinas y Serrano (1897-1951) Mauricio Bacarisse (1895-1931),  José Bello (1904-2008), Rogelio Buendia (1891-1969), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), Juan José Domenchina (1898-1959), Gerardo Diego (1896-1987),Antonio Espina (1894-1972), Agustin Espinosa (1897-1939), Federico Garcia Lorca (1898- 1936),  Juan Gil-Albert (1904-1994), Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988), Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), José Maria Hinojosa (1904-1936) who wrote the famous La Flor de California.etc.  Alberti wrote in a mainly romantic style in his early years but as he grew older wrote more and more political and social poetry.Guillén celebrated life in the present. Lorca wrote on love, the Spanish countryside, cities in Granada and later New York, gitanos in odes, sonnets and towards the end of his life in gacelas and casidas etc. Gerardo Diego was actively involved in the ultraist movement of Guillermo de Torre and Luis Borges, which sought to fight against the excesses of modernismo and eliminate useless middle sentences, (gongorism) articles, adjectives, excessive lyricism, sentimentalism, combining two or more images into one, to use evocative imagery about the machines and the modern world taking their cue from the French symbolists, to abandon all rhyme scheme, put emphasis on the layout of the words of the poem on the printed page like that advocated by Ezra Pound. Pedro Salinas wrote mainly on love. They also share certain common values with creationism of Huidobro who advocated that the poem must be something self-sufficient, always something completely new, rather like a tree being created by Nature.   

Whatever may have been their individual subject matter and styles, the generation of 1927 did their best to revive the Spanish folk tradition, folk lores and attempted to write in a popular style, but trying also to fuse the classical literary tradition with elements of the European avant garde, emphasizing the music in poetry. Some of them also adopted the baroque imagery from the Spanish folk tradition and also created some new Gothic images of the city and juxtaposed what is inside the human psyche with what is outside in the physical, natural or urban world. In different ways and to different extents they were influenced by the Surrealism of Dali, especially Luis Cernuda and some of them were influenced by Cubist, Futurist, Ultraist and Creationist ideas. They sometimes also wrote in free verse, breaking the rigid rules related to rhyming, the number of syllables and also length of poems according to the needs of the expression of emotions in the particular context of the individual poems.

In fact, the Generation of 1927 includes more than mere poets and writers. In a wider context, they also include such surrealist painters as Dali and Oscar Dominguez, the painter and sculptor Maruja Mallo, the film maker Luis Buñuel, the caricaturist K-Hito, the toreros Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (for whose death on the plaza Lorca wrote a famous Llanto as a homage ), Rodolfo Halffter and his musicologist brother Ernesto Haffter of the so-called Group of 8 and also a group of Catalan artists who called themselves the Grupo de Artistas Catalanes Independientes including such names as Roberto Gerhard, Ricardo Lamote de Grignon and the composer Federico Mompou. 

The Generation of 1927 was centred not only in Madrid but in spirit also in Sevilla around the review Mediodia, in the Tenerife around the Gaceta de Arte and in Malaga around the reveiw Litoral.

The Generation of 1927 suffered heavy casualties as a result of the Spanish Civil War: Lorca was murdered, Hernandez died in jail, and others like Alberti, Jose Bergamin, Leon Felipe, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Juan Ramon Jiménez, (1881-1958) another Nobel prize winner  and Mauricio Bacarisse were forced into exile, although virtually all kept writing and publishing late into the 20th century. The war split the group. Only Dámaso Alonso remained reluctantly in Spain but Gerardo Diego surrendered and actively supported the traditionalism of Franco, mixing many elements of Spanish culture like its toreros, its church, its music and even existentialist concerns. Still others like Juan Gil-Albert withdrew within himself and explored the world of his emotions and thought as a kind of interior exile and gave support to new poets like Vincente Aleixandre. But few of them really came to terms with the regime of Franco. This was to be done by what has been called the Generation of the 50's.