Poetry is for Salinas a way of knowing and gaining access to the essence of reality. Authenticity, beauty, and ingenuity are the three basic elements of his work. For the poet, feeling and wit demonstrate intelligence, and he combines them in a very personal way. Wit is the necessary instrument to delve into the feelings and the human experiences, bringing to light what lies beyond the specific anecdotes. This exercise, thinks the poet,  gets him closer to the absolute. The main characteristic of his art is the externalization of the individual interior life. This is why the poet manifests himself in paradoxes, unusual observations, subtle games of ideas, and condensation of concepts, making the language bend to that undertaking of his delving into the human.

Its metric is apparently simple, preferring the short verse, mainly the silva structure, but almost always renouncing to make it rhyme. However the look of simplicity, his poetry is rigorously worked,  the words are placed with thoughtful accuracy. His first poems, Presagios, Seguro Azar, Fabula y signo,  are part of the phase where he wrote pure poetry, under the influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez. In them, there are sometimes themes related to Futurism and modern objects, such as electricity, the machine, the heating radiator, etc. But already in those poems, he knows how to find deep, hidden meaning in those apparently mundane objects.

His two masterpieces are, La voz a ti devida (1933), and Razón de amor (1936). Both confer on Salinas his stature as a great poet of love, investigating the subtleties of this universal phenomenon. He parts from a position contrary to the romantics: love is, instead of suffering, a prodigious force that gives fulfillment to life and meaning to the world. It is the source of enrichment of any human being for both the loved one the lover. Only in his last poems sometimes a more serious tone appears,  speaking of the limits of love and its inevitable, end. 

After WW II, he published two books of poems, El contemplado (1946) and Todo más claro (1949). In them, his faith in life struggles with the distressing signs he perceives around him. From this last stage stands out the impressive poem" I believe", aroused by the destructive danger of the atomic bomb, incorporating into his poetry echoes of the 20th-century anguish.

Presagios

Seguro azar

Fábula y signo

La voz a ti debida

Razón de amor

El contemplado

Salinas wrote this book of love poetry during the beginning of his exile in the United States due to the Spanish Civil War.

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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Largo lamento (1938)

By Pedro Salinas

Time Period: Generation of '27

Genre: Poetry

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