Generation of '27
Quick answer: The Generation of '27 was a circle of Spanish poets, Lorca among them, who fused tradition with the avant-garde. Meet the key figures and their legacy.
The Generation of '27 was a constellation of Spanish poets who rose together in the 1920s and took their name from a gathering held in Seville in 1927 to mark three hundred years since the death of the Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Federico García Lorca is the most famous member, alongside Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego and Dámaso Alonso. What united them was a double loyalty: to Spain's oldest popular forms, the ballad and the song, and to the newest European experiments, surrealism above all.
Their work matters to any poet interested in how tradition and experiment can strengthen rather than cancel each other. It also carries the weight of history, because the Spanish Civil War destroyed the group as a living community.
History and Key Figures
The poets knew each other through Madrid's student residence, little magazines and shared platforms. Lorca's gypsy ballads made folk material feel electric and strange; Alberti moved from sailor songs to surrealist anguish; Cernuda wrote of desire and exile with unmatched candour; Salinas and Guillén pursued a purer, more cerebral lyric; Aleixandre would win the Nobel Prize in 1977. Women artists and writers moved in the same circles, among them Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcín, a group later remembered as Las Sinsombrero.
The Civil War scattered everything. Lorca was murdered in 1936; most of the others endured decades of exile in the Americas or a muffled interior exile at home.
What Sets Their Work Apart
Three currents braid through the group. First, neopopularismo: refined poems built on folk song, short lines, refrains and the old Spanish romance metre. Second, the pull of Góngora, whose dense Baroque metaphors they rehabilitated after centuries of neglect. Third, surrealism, which freed their imagery from logic, most visibly in Lorca's New York poems and Alberti's darker books. A single poet could work all three veins in a single decade, which is why the group resists a single label.
How to Learn from Them
Their central lesson is that the avant-garde does not require abandoning inherited music. Take a traditional shape from your own culture, a ballad, a lullaby, a work chant, and load it with imagery no tradition would predict. That collision is the Generation of '27 method in miniature, and it still produces poems that feel both ancient and new.
What poets can take from this
- Read Lorca's ballads beside a plain folk ballad to see exactly what he added.
- Try writing a strict refrain, then let the imagery inside the stanzas go strange.
- Study Cernuda for tone: intimate, unguarded, never sentimental.
- Do not treat surrealist imagery as randomness; the best of it obeys emotional logic.
- Remember Las Sinsombrero when you map the era; the standard list of names was never the whole room.
Try it yourself
Choose a song form you heard in childhood, keep its rhythm and refrain, and fill it with images drawn from a modern city at 3 a.m., letting the old music and the new material argue with each other.
Questions
Why is it called the Generation of '27?
Because of the 1927 tercentenary celebrations in Seville honouring the Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, which brought the young poets together publicly. The date stuck as a convenient label for the whole circle.
Which poets belonged to the Generation of '27?
The usual list includes Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Cernuda, Salinas, Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre. Associated women, Las Sinsombrero, included Concha Méndez and Ernestina de Champourcín.
What happened to the group after the Spanish Civil War?
It ceased to exist as a community. Lorca was killed in 1936, and most surviving members went into long exile in Latin America or lived quietly under the dictatorship in Spain.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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