Jorge Guillén

Jorge Guillén was born on January 18, 1893, in Valladolid, Old Castile, Spain. He is regarded as one of the greatest Spanish poets of the twentieth century. He attended school in Valladolid, Madrid, and Granada, as well as in Switzerland and Germany. He began writing poetry in 1919.

Guillén lectured at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, the University of Murcia, and the University of Seville. A member of “the Generation of 1927,” which included Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Pedro Salinas. Guillén gained recognition in the early 1920s with his first poems but left Spain in 1938 after the military uprising under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Guillén taught and wrote poetry in the United States for more than twenty years and was a professor at Wellesley College until his retirement in 1957. “I am decidedly in favor of compound, complex poetry,” the poet said in 1926, “of the poem made of poetry and other human things.” Much of his work explores the relationship of form to matter while delighting in sensuality and clarity of perception.

The bulk of Guillén’s work is collected in the volume Aire nuestro [Our Air](All’Insegna del Pesce d’oro, 1968), published in Milan. The text comprises three of his major books: Cantico (Revista de Occidente, 1928); Clamor, published in three volumes in 1957, 1960, and 1963 by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires; and Homenaje (All’Insegna del Pesce d’oro, 1967). Guillén, capable of both formal sophistication and meditative openness, exhibits a consciousness fully receptive to the external world, to appearances and essences. His kind of seeing finds, as Emerson put it, “the miraculous in the common.” Whether affirming life by way of a secular mysticism or condemning the brutalities of the Fascist regime, he gives us the inventiveness and quality of attention found in the work of writers such as Odysseus Elytis, Vicente Aleixandre, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Guillén received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the San Luca Prize, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize, and the Ollin Yolitzli Prize. He returned to Spain two years after Franco’s death, in 1977, and died in 1984 in Malaga.