Hola a todos! I hope that everyone has had a wonderful first weeks back at school. For the Spanish Corner’s first instalment this year, I wanted to introduce you to Jorge Guillén, a Spanish poet whom I read about during the Summer holidays.
Coincidentally, I first came across his works whilst organising books as part of library monitoring at school. I love poetry after all, and I discovered a section of Spanish and French poems in the sixth form library. Particularly, the selected poems of Guillén from his book ‘Cántico’ stood out to me (due to their consistent rhyme and structure), so I took it home to read.
To put it briefly, Jorge Guillén was a Spanish poet, lecturer, and literary critic. He was also a part of the Generation of ’27, a group of Spain’s most influential poets between 1923 and 1927. He was born in 1893 in Valladolid, Spain, and lived in many places such as Paris and the UK, where he lectured the university of Oxford. When the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, he and his family fled to live in exile in the United States. Despite all of this (after having survived both world wars, dictatorship, and exile), Guillén always wrote poetry with optimism and positivity.
I absolutely loved his work. Although admittedly I couldn’t understand his every poem, there were helpful analyses in the index which explained the meanings. I then watched an online lecture about his work, which I really enjoyed. I think that my favourite thing about his poetry is the fact that he manages to find the beauty and celebrations of life in periods of darkness. His poems are usually impersonal (not much of the ‘I’ person), and I read online that he follows what French poet Paul Valéry deemed ‘ideal poetry’—that “pure poetry is what is left after the elimination of everything that is not poetry.”
My favourite poems of his include ‘Amor de una mañana’ (about admiration), ‘Al ser querido’ (about mourning his wife), and ‘Quiero dormir’ (about wishing to sleep to escape the day—I think this was probably a later poem, as in his later collections his poems became more reflective).
In ‘Cántico: selected poems’, Donald McCrory writes that “Guillén saw it as the poet’s task to distil everyday experience into the purest form, so that nothing is in the poem save the experience itself.” I would really recommend his poetry to anyone who enjoys reading—I’m sure that there are many translated works which are equally as beautiful and thought-provoking.
