Jorge Guillén facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jorge Guillén
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Sculpture of Jorge Guillén in los Jardines del Poniente de Valladolid
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| Born |
Jorge Guillén Álvarez
18 January 1893 Valladolid, Spain
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| Died | 6 February 1984 (aged 91) Málaga, Spain
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| Spouse(s) |
Germaine Cahen
(m. 1924; died 1947)Irene Mochi-Sismondi
(m. 1958) |
| Children | Claudio Guillén, Teresa Gilman née Guillén |
| Awards | Premio Cervantes, Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes, Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía, Ollin Yoliztli Prize |
Jorge Guillén Álvarez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxoɾxe ɣiˈʎen]; 18 January 1893 – 6 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. 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. This was also the period when his first poems were starting to be published in España and La pluma. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 he was back in Valladolid and was briefly imprisoned in Pamplona for political reasons. 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.
He joined Salinas at Wellesley College and stayed there as the Professor of Spanish from 1941 to his retirement in 1957. 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.
Guillén and Salinas
These two poets have often been compared to each other. To some extent this is because they were good friends and slightly older than most of the other leading members of their generation, as well as sharing similar career-paths, but they also seemed to share a similar approach to poetry. Their poems often have a rarefied quality and tend not to deal with "particulars", readily identifiable people and places. However, they did differ in many respects as exemplified by the titles they gave to their published lectures on Spanish poetry. At Johns Hopkins, Salinas published a collection called Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, whereas Guillén's Norton lectures were called Language and Poetry. Both devoted single lectures to Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz and the comparisons between them are instructive. Salinas seems to want to show us the poetic reality behind or beyond appearances, to educate us into how to see whereas Guillén gives us an account of the thoughts and sense-impressions going through his own mind: the reader is a viewer of this process not a participant in it. Vicente Aleixandre recalled visiting Salinas and finding him at his desk with his daughter on one knee and his son on the other and stretching out a hand clutching a pen to shake hands with his visitor. Although he was also devoted to his family, Guillén probably worked in a secluded study.
Poetic work
- Cántico (75 poems), M., Revista de Occidente, 1928
- Cántico (125 poems), M., Cruz y Raya, 1936
- Cántico (270 poems), México, Litoral, 1945
- Cántico (334 poems), Bs. As., Sudamericana, 1950
- Huerto de Melibea, M., Ínsula, 1954
- Del amanecer y el despertar, Valladolid, 1956
- Clamor. Maremagnun, Bs. As., Sudamericana, 1957
- Lugar de Lázaro, Málaga, Col. A quien conmigo va, 1957
- Clamor... Que van a dar en la mar, Bs. As., Sudamericana, 1960
- Historia Natural, Palma de Mallorca, Papeles de Sons Armadans, 1960
- Las tentaciones de Antonio, Florencia/Santander, Graf. Hermanos Bedia, 1962
- Según las horas, Puerto Rico, Editorial Universitaria, 1962
- Clamor. A la altura de las circunstancias, Bs. As., Sudamericana, 1963
- Homenaje. Reunión de vidas, Milán, All'Insegna del Pesce d'oro, 1967
- Aire nuestro: Cántico, Clamor, Homenaje, Milán, All'Insegna del Pesce d'oro, 1968
- Guirnalda civil, Cambridge, Halty Eferguson, 1970
- Al margen, M., Visor, 1972
- Y otros poemas, Bs. As., Muchnik, 1973
- Convivencia, M., Turner, 1975
- Final, B., Barral, 1981
- La expresión, Ferrol, Sociedad de Cultura Valle-Inclán, 1981
- Horses in the Air and Other Poems, 1999
Popular culture
- Giannina Braschi's Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) features a debate about the creators versus the masters of Spanish and Latin American poetry. The debate discusses Jorge Guillén along with Vicente Aleixandre, Vicente Huidobro, Luis Cernuda, Alberti, Pedro Salinas, as the great masters.
- Eduardo Chillida created the monument entitled Homage to Jorge Guillén, which stands outside National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain.
- Luis Santiago Pardo created a monument called Jorge Guillén and Childhood in Poniente Gardens in 1998.
- The Spanish government has issued postage stamps featuring his portraits in 1993.
See also
In Spanish: Jorge Guillén para niños
- Miguel de Cervantes Prize
- Pedro Salinas
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
- Spanish poetry
