Guillén is considered the highest representative of pure poetry, along with Juan Ramón Jiménez. The author carries out a very personal stylization of reality. He gets often inspired by a particular fact of reality and extracts from them the most quintessential ideas or feelings. To compose the highly conceptual aspect of his poetry he follows a meticulous procedure of elimination and selection, arriving at a language devoid of flattery that directly touches the sensitivity of the reader. Each phrase, each word, tries to condense the essence of what the poet wants to express. This attention to the essential responds to the unmistakable features of his style, such as the abundance of nouns and noun phrases, because nouns capture the essence of things, as opposed to verbs that reflect their existence.

For the most part, Guillén's is not of anguish or hopelessness, but of protest from a positive point of view. His complaints never entail tarnishing his faith in the individual and in life in general. He never gives in to discouragement, saying "yes" to the world even when he admits it contains also injustice and pain.  HIs is balanced poetry, full of care for the spiritual, paying homage to life despite the clamor for its distress. 

Poetry for Guillen is not something ineffable,  elusive, and ethereal, but rather it materializes in concrete poems, written in a few pages, which require the formal and human elements for their elaboration. Its intellectualization, its apparent coldness, is nothing but the ability to filter personal impressions, through intelligence, to turn them into precise, perfect objects, in which nothing is superfluous. His knowing how to use the keywords, through careful construction, omitting the anecdotal, is what gives his poetry a total beauty, which does not prevent seeing the deep human heartbeat behind it.

Cántico (1928- 1950)

Clamor. A la altura de las circunstancias (1963)

Homenaje (1967)

Historia natural

In the compilation book of poems Cántico, Guillén deals with the existential moment, the exact minute that the poet lives and the passage of time in general, his poetic gaze sublimating the existence of man and creation.

Poetry

In 1927, a series of young writers gathered at the Seville Athenaeum to commemorate the third centenary of Góngora's death. There are writers like García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Alberti, Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, and Luis Cernuda, among the most representative of what would later become the Generation of '27. Of approximate age and similar academic training, they constitute a compact group and all its members were aware of belonging to the group of this literary generation.

 The Generation of ‘27 has been characterized since its origin by the search for a new poetic language, even when each member develops their personal style. These poets' desire for renewal is combined with fair respect for the literature of the past. They admired Unamuno, and especially Antonio Machado, they fairly valued Rubén Darío and felt a fascination for Juan Ramón Jiménez and Bécquer, especially in his early days. In their search for a strictly poetic language, the example of Góngora was decisive, well known by the elaborate language within in his work Polifemo. 

Despite their highly cultured aesthetics, these writers have a veneration for popular forms, such as the traditional Cancionero and ballads. In addition to this admiration for tradition, they were also influenced by foreign literary currents, such as the French poet Valèry or the Anglo-Saxon T. S. Eliot. The group evolves from the original search for pure poetry, with even dehumanizing features due to its influence with the surrealist movement, towards the literature of social commitment, in the years preceding the Spanish Civil War, assimilating past and traditional forms with other more modern ones and produces an immense renewal of Spanish lyric.

Generation of '27

Celebration of Anniversary of the death of Luís de Góngora at the Ateneo de Sevilla.

Pedro Salinas publishes La voz a ti debida, a poem in which love appears as the key to organizing reality.

Pedro Salinas writes Confianza, a collection of poems that incorporate moral reflection and concern for the future of humanity into their poetry.

Jorge Guillén publishes Cántico, agnostic poetry that unreservedly reveals and perceives the world as well done.

Dámaso Alonso publishes Hijos de la hira, an existential book that reflects the misery of the postwar period after the Spanish Civil War.

Federico Garcia Lorca writes the Poema del cante jondo, where the poet pays tribute to the sentimental concentration of the traditional "copla".

Rafael Alberty publishes Marinero en tierra, where the poet recovers the memory of the immediacy of the sea in his childhood.

Martin Heidegger writes Dasein, where he exposes the philosophical assumption that the human being knows in a preontological way the factors that make up life.

William Falkner writes The Sound and the Fury, a book that recounts the progressive degeneration of a family, its secrets and the love and hate relationships that sustain and destroy it.

André Malraux writes La Condition Humaine, where he describes a serious, gloomy and violent world, dominated by logic, in which a mixture of fantasy and absurdity breaks out in search of freedom.

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Cántico (1928)

By Jorge Guillén

Time Period: Generation of '27

Genre: Poetry

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