Generation of 1927

Generation of 1927, in Spain, a group of poets and other writers who rose to prominence in the late 1920s and who derived their collective name from the year in which several of them produced important commemorative editions of the poetry of Luis de Góngora y Argote on the tercentenary of his death. In contrast to the earlier Generation of ’98, most of whom were prose writers, the members of the Generation of 1927 were almost without exception poets. Chief among them were Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Gerardo Diego, and Dámaso Alonso. Generally speaking, these poets were influenced by such wider European movements as Symbolism, Futurism, and Surrealism, and they helped introduce the tenets of these movements into Spanish literature. They rejected the use of traditional metre and rhyme and discarded anecdotal treatment and strictly logical descriptions in their poems. Instead, they made a constant and audacious use of metaphor, coined new words, and introduced highly symbolic or suggestive images into their poems in an effort to convey aspects of inner personal experience. They also drew on ballads, traditional songs and lyrics, and on Góngora’s poetry itself for subject matter.

The poets of the Generation of 1927 differed in their individual styles and concerns, but collectively they formed the dominant trend in Spanish poetry during the 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and its aftermath blunted the type of experimentation practiced by these poets, however, and subsequent Spanish poetry turned away from their highly cultivated and abstruse aestheticism.