Jorge Guillén Álvarez (; 18 January 18936 February 1984) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, a university teacher, a scholar and a literary critic.
In 1957–1958, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, which were published in 1961 under the title Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain. The final lecture was a tribute to his colleagues in the Generation of '27. In 1983, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
Biography Jorge Guillén was born in Valladolid where he spent his childhood and adolescence. From 1909 to 1911 he lived in Switzerland. He studied at the universities of Madrid – lodging in the Residencia de Estudiantes – and Granada, where he took his licenciatura in philosophy in 1913.Connell p 168 His life paralleled that of his friend Pedro Salinas, whom he succeeded as a Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris from 1917 to 1923. While in Paris, he met and, in 1921, married Germaine Cahen. They had two children, a son Claudio born in 1924 who became a noted critic and scholar of comparative literature, and a daughter Teresa who married the Harvard professor Stephen Gilman.
He took his doctorate at the University of Madrid in 1924 with a dissertation on Góngora's notoriously difficult and, at that time, neglected long poem Polifemo.Havard p 18 This was also the period when his first poems were starting to be published in España and La pluma.Connell p 168 He was appointed to the chair of Spanish Literature at the University of Murcia from 1925 to 1929, where, with Juan Guerrero Ruiz and José Ballester Nicolás, he founded and edited a literary magazine called Verso y Prosa.
He continued to visit the Residencia de Estudiantes although his academic responsibilities limited his attendance to vacations. This allowed him to make the acquaintance of the younger members of the Generation – such as Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca. He became a regular correspondent of the latter and, on the occasion of a visit by Lorca to the Arts Club of Valladolid in April 1926, Guillén delivered an introduction to a poetry reading which was a considered and sympathetic appraisal of a man whom he considered to be already a poetic genius, although he had only published one collection.Gibson p 162
He also participated in the Tercentenary celebrations in honour of Góngora. The volume of Octavas that he was supposed to edit, however, was never completed but he did give a reading of some of his own poems at an event in Seville with great success.Alberti p 254
He became the lector at Oxford University from 1929 to 1931, and was appointed to a professorship at the University of Seville in 1932. On 8 March 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre.Gibson p348 In August 1933, he was able to attend performances at the Magdalena Palace in Santander by the travelling theatre company La Barraca that Lorca led.Gibson p359 On 12 July 1936 he was present at a party in Madrid that took place just before García Lorca departed to Granada for the last time before his murder. It was there that Lorca read his new play La Casa de Bernarda Alba for the last time.Gibson p442
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 he was back in Valladolid and was briefly imprisoned in Pamplona by Francoists for political reasons.Havard p 67 He returned to his post in Seville and continued there until July 1938, when he decided to go into exile in the USA together with his wife and two teenage children. Apart from the turmoil in Spain itself, the fact that his wife was Jewish might have caused him concern.Havard p 67
He joined Salinas at Wellesley College and stayed there as the Professor of Spanish from 1941 to his retirement in 1957.Jorge Guillen Is Dead at 91; A Spanish Poet and Teacher - New York Times He retired to Italy. In 1958 in Florence he married Irene Mochi-Sismondi, his first wife having died in 1947. He continued to give lectures at Harvard, Princeton and Puerto Rico, and for a spell was Mellon Professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh, until he broke his hip in a fall in 1970. In 1976 he moved to the city of Málaga.
In 1976, he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious prize for Spanish-language writers, and in 1977 the Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes. He died in Málaga in 1984, aged 91 and was buried there in the Anglican Cemetery of Saint George.
Analysis of his work
Cántico
1928 edition
Although a glimpse at the collected poems of Guillén suggests that he was a prolific poet, he was slow to get started. He only seems to have started writing poems when he was in Paris in 1919 when he was already 25. Over the next 10 years he published quite frequently in the small magazines of the day and began to build a name for himself amongst the members of his generation, including Dámaso Alonso and Federico García Lorca.Havard p 11 As early as 1923 Pedro Salinas urged him to publish a collection but he would not be hurried. Two of his key character traits are revealed by this long gestation period: his quest for perfection and an innate reserve. He was in fact the last of the major figures of the generation to gather together a collection, the first instalment of Cántico- at this stage a collection of 75 poems – which was published by the Revista de Occidente (a journal edited by Ortega y Gasset) in 1928. He was by this time 35.
Correspondence with García Lorca shows just how painstaking he was, spending months polishing, revising and correcting poems that he had already written and published, to a point where they were practically unrecognisable from the way they had first appeared in public.Havard p 11 Clarity and coherence were his major objectives but he also seemed to wish to avoid obvious self-revelation and any hint of sentimentality. Lorca's reaction in a postcard to Guillén written on 27 December 1928 captures the elements that dominate most critical responses to the latter's poetry: an opposition between the jubilant, physical celebration of reality that his poems try to capture and, on the other hand, its extreme technical purity, which can seem cold and overly intellectual.Havard p 9
During his time in Paris, Guillén had come under the influence of Paul Valéry. Valéry was closely associated with the ideal of pure poetry and Guillén later recalled him saying that "Pure poetry is what is left after the elimination of everything that is not poetry."Havard p 18 He was also inspired by Valéry's belief that a poet should only write one book – Un, qui est le bon et le seul de son êtreValéry Oeuvres vol 1 pp 1560-61 - a remark that makes sense of Guillén's career, both of the accretive process that led ultimately to the finished Cántico, and also of the impulse that led him to combine all his published poetry into one collection Aire nuestro in 1968. He also translated four of Valéry's poems, including the celebrated "Le Cimetière marin," into Spanish. However, in Language and Poetry, he also recorded a debt to the poetic rigour of Góngora, showing that he could trace this concern for stylistic purity back much further than Valéry.
Even in his earliest poems, such as "Gran silencio", the language is impersonal; the poet does not make any appearance in the poem. His poems offer an ecstatic reaction to the geometrical forms or the objects they describe but this is a generic reaction not Guillén's personal response. He is like an aesthetician or philosopher presenting things for the reader's edification. In "La salida", the only verbs that occur are infinitives. This means that what is described has no specific agent or time, again helping Guillén to become anonymous and guard against sentimentality.Havard p 14 Like Valéry, he also writes poems that reflect upon poetry itself, for example "El ruiseñor" and "La rosa", both written in Guillén's favourite form, the décima, typically a stanza of 10 octosyllabic lines rhyming ABBAACCDDC, although he used many variations, such as a rhyme scheme borrowed from the French dizain, ABABCCDEED.
However, although Valéry,
read and reread with great devotion by the Castilian poet, was a model of exemplary elevation of subject matter and of exemplary rigor of style,Guillen L and P p 208
Guillén concludes by saying that Cántico
can be defined negatively as the antithesis of Valéry's Charmes.Guillen L and P p 208
Guillén stresses a determination to treat poetry as creation, a poem as a world in quintessence.Guillen L and P p 208 For Valéry, poetry is a process of self-discovery, an exercise in consciousness, working out what it means to be an individual poet exploring reality. Guillén accepts reality for what it is and he wants to show what he has in common with other humans in the timeless experience of being.Havard p 25 It is a phenomenology that derives from Ortega y Gasset as exemplified in his work Meditaciones del Quijote.
1936 edition
The next edition of Cántico contained 125 poems. It was published by Cruz y Raya – a journal edited by José Bergamín – in 1936. While many members of his generation had suffered some form of crisis towards the end of the 1920s – amongst them Alberti, Garcia Lorca, Aleixandre, Cernuda – there were no signs of personal upheaval or radical change in Guillén's approach to poetry. Instead there is a deepening of the approach to reality contained in the first edition. Reality is potentially perfect. All it requires is the active participation of an onlooker to raise it to its full potencyHavard p 39 as explained by Ortega in the Meditaciones.
There is stylistic development as well in that some of the new poems are lengthy; "Salvación de la primavera" amounts to 55 quatrains (220 lines) and "Más allá", which eventually became the very first book in the collection, consists of 50 quatrains. There are also more medium-length poems of around 40-50 lines, such as "Viento saltado" and "El desterrado", most of which were written or started during Guillén's period of residence at Oxford. The collection is grouped into 5 sections, frequently book-ended by these longer poems, so that it has a more formally pleasing shape. The versification is also more varied; there are many more romances (octosyllabic lines with assonance in the even-numbered lines); Guillén starts to write sonnets; he introduces longer lines and also the assonantal quatrains of the longer poems.
The longer poems are inevitably less abstract and impersonal but they do not show any real break with his approach to poetry. In place of the concentrated focus on one object or small group of objects, the longer poems have scope for a more comprehensive assessment of exterior reality. Instead of flashes of ecstasy, the pursuit of plenitude and essence is an ongoing quest. The poetry continues to avoid anecdotal narrative but the greater circumstantial and temporal definition of the longer poems gives this edition an enhanced awareness of human contact with the real world.Havard p 41 There is in addition a far more detailed examination of big themes such as love – "Salvación de la primavera" – and death – "Muerte a lo lejos" – although the poet takes a very detached view of death. It will happen one day and until then, he can enjoy life in the present.