Last of Spain's Generation of 1927 poets

With the death on October 28th of the Spanish poet and painter, Rafael Alberti, Spain has lost the last of those great poets …

With the death on October 28th of the Spanish poet and painter, Rafael Alberti, Spain has lost the last of those great poets who constituted the Generation of 1927. That generation included Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, and Rafael Alberti himself, who outlived all of them to reach the ripe age of 96.

For most of his life less well known than his friend Lorca, both in Spain and abroad, he was a considerable poet by any standards. He was constantly innovative throughout his long life and has left behind a substantial body of fine work both in poetry and the visual arts.

Born in the small fishing village of Puerto de Santa Maria (Cadiz) - the source of many of his finest short lyrics - he moved with his family to Madrid in 1917. There he studied painting and hoped to achieve fame in that medium. Although he did have an exhibition in the Ateneo in Madrid in 1922, and although he continued to paint throughout his life, it was poetry that was to be his main preoccupation and in which he would ultimately achieve fame.

Poor health and the suspicion of tuberculosis obliged him to leave Madrid and stay in a sanatorium in the Sierra de Guadarrama outside Madrid. While there he produced the playful, graceful lyrics that went into his first book in 1924, Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Land). In these poems he evokes memories of the bay of Cadiz of his childhood. While playful, they are tinged with melancholy, as the landlocked poet feels the loss of his childhood world.

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The playfulness of Marinero en tierra is continued into his second book El alba del alheli (1927) (The Dawn of the Wallflower), but this playfulness startlingly gives way to the desperate craziness of his best-known book, Sobre los angeles (1929) (Concerning Angels). The poems in this book are riven, technically and thematically, by a major crisis in the poet's life. It is the equivalent of Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York. "To go to hell", Rafael Alberti wrote, "there is no need to change position or posture."

When the civil war broke out, he vociferously committed himself as a poet and intellectual to the republic. In the manner of many Russian poets, he read explicitly propagandist poems to large groups. A good deal of this work, as indeed a good deal of the later work, has not well survived the passage of time.

With the fall of the republic in 1939, he fled to Buenos Aires where he worked for the publishing company, Losado, as well as continuing his experiments in art and design. His autobiography, La arboleda perdida (The Lost Grove) appeared in 1959 and it contains a record of the poet's many years of exile. Previously, in 1952, he published a fine book of poems inspired by painting, A la pintura (On Painting).

In 1961 he moved to Italy where he stayed, with some periods spent in other countries, until 1977 when he finally and permanently returned to Spain after the death of Franco. He again became active in politics, taking a seat in parliament for the Communist Party. He made some contribution to healing the rift between the left and right factions, necessary to enable Spain to make its transition from dictatorship to democracy. Wearying of politics, however, he resumed his interest in writing.

For all the astonishing multiplicity of his talents, he did not have Lorca's intense, instinctive self-assurance as a poet, and too much of his work is a hit-or-miss affair. He will probably be best remembered for the beautifully crafted short lyrics, such as the following, which are to be found throughout his work:

Sleep, my love. On the lost orchard of the sea your comb plies back and forth though a green mermaid's hair . . .

A little green mermaid who combs her hair by the sea as the shore swings back and forth.

Sleep, my love. Back and forth it swings.

Rafael Alberti: born 1902; died October, 1999