Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender born 28 February 1909 (d. 1995)

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work.

Born in London to a journalist father, Spender went to University College, Oxford, where he met W H Auden. He did not finish his degree and went to Germany. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice, and C Day Lewis. He would later come to know W B Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T S Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934], a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.

Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988 under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England — particularly about relationships between men — and showing frightening anticipations of Nazism, which are confusingly related to the very openness the main character admires.

When the Spanish civil war began, he went to Spain with the International Brigades (who were fighting against Francisco Franco's fascist forces) to report and observe for the Communist Party of Great Britain.

A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like fellow poets W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service in World War II. He was initially graded 'C' upon examination due to his earlier Colitis, poor eyesight, varicose veins and the long term effects of a tapeworm on 1934. However, he contrived by pulling strings to be re examined and was upgraded to 'B' which meant that he could serve in the London Auxiliary Fire Service.

Spender sued author David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with 'Jimmy Younger' in Leavitt's While England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.

Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. Spender's seemingly changing attitudes towards homosexuality and heterosexuality have caused him to be labelled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labelling. Many of his friends in his earlier years were gay. Spender himself had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably with Tony Hyndman (who is called 'Jimmy Younger' in his memoir World Within World). Following his affair with Muriel Gardiner he shifted his focus to heterosexuality, though his relationship with Hyndman complicated both this relationship and his short-lived marriage to Inez Maria Pearn (1936-39). His marriage to concert pianist Natasha Litvin in 1941 seems to have marked the end of his romantic relationships with men. Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry.

Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda born 21 September 1902 (d. 1963)

Luis Cernuda, born Luis Cernuda Bidón in Seville, was a Spanish poet and literary critic.

The son of a military man, Cernuda received a strict education as a child, and then studied law at the University of Seville, where he met the poet and literature professor Pedro Salinas. In 1928, after his mother died, Cernuda left his home town, with which he had all his life an intense love-hate relationship.

He briefly moved to Madrid, where he quickly became part of the literary scene. His mentor and former professor Salinas arranged for him to take a lectureship for a year at the University of Toulouse. From June 1929 until 1937 Cernuda lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital. Cernuda collaborated with many organisations working to support a more liberal and tolerant Spain. He participated in the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia.

The central concerns of this poet are evident in the title of his life's major opus: La realidad y el deseo ('Reality and Desire'). He published his first collection of verse, Perfil del aire ('Profile of the Air'), in 1927. Several books followed, and he collected new and already published poetry under this title in 1936. Subsequent editions would include new poetry as new books inside La realidad y el deseo. Expanded on almost until his death in 1963, in this work the poet explores desire, love, subject, object, history and sexuality in poems which draw influences from romanticism, classicism, and the surrealist avant-garde.

Cernuda is known as a member of the Generation of '27, a group of Spanish poets and artists including Federico García Lorca. He broke new ground with Los Placeres Prohibidos ('Forbidden Pleasures'), an avant-garde work in which the poet used surrealism to explore his sexuality.

Deeply influenced by André Gide, Cernuda embraced his homosexuality at an early age and made homosexual desire and love the core of his poetry. Or, at least, unlike other gay poets at the time, in his poetry he was never ambiguous about the fact that the objects of his desire and love were men. One of the most influential poets in contemporary Spanish poetry, he is definitely a crucial ground-breaking figure for homosexual writing in Spanish.

During the Spanish Civil War, Cernuda fled to England, where he began an exile that later took him to France, Scotland, Massachusetts, California and finally settling in Mexico; he never returned to Spain.

Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca born 5 June 1898 (d. 1936)

Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet and dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An emblematic member of the Generation of '27, he was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Born into a family of minor, but wealthy, landowners in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, García Lorca was a precocious child, although he did not excel at school. In 1909, his father moved the family to the city of Granada, Andalusia where in time he became deeply involved in local artistic circles. His first collection of prose pieces, Impresiones y paisajes, was published in 1918 to local acclaim but little commercial success.

Associations made at Granada's Arts Club were to stand him in good stead when he moved in 1919 to the famous Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid. At the School of Philosophy of the University of Madrid (current-day Universidad Complutense de Madrid) he would befriend Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, amongst many others who were or would become influential artists in Spain. Here he met Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava, at whose invitation he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa, in 1919-20. A verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects, it was laughed off stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and soured García Lorca's attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career; he would later claim that 1927's Mariana Pineda was his first play.

Over the next few years García Lorca became increasingly involved in his art and Spain's avant-garde. He published three further collections of poems including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (1928, translated as 'Gypsy Ballads', 1953), his best known book of poetry. His second play Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927.

However, towards the end of the 1920s, García Lorca fell victim to increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over the increasingly unsuccessful concealment of his homosexuality from friends and family. In this he was deeply affected by the success of his Romancero gitano, which increased—through the celebrity it brought him—the painful dichotomy of his life: he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured self, which he could only acknowledge in private.

Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which García Lorca interpreted, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack on him. The film ended Lorca's affair with Dalí, along with Dalí meeting his future wife Gala. At the same time, his intensely passionate but fatally one-sided affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén was collapsing as the latter became involved with his future wife. Aware of these problems (though not perhaps of their causes), García Lorca's family arranged for him to take a lengthy tour of the United States in 1929-30.

García Lorca's stay in America, particularly New York City, where he studied briefly at Columbia University School of General Studies, was his first adult experience of a democratic society, albeit one he considered to be dominated by rampant commercialism and the social oppression of minority groups, and it acted as a catalyst for some of his most daring work. His collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York explores his alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques, and the two plays Así que pasen cinco años and El público were far ahead of their time—indeed, El público was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety.

His return to Spain in 1930 coincided with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the re-establishment of the Spanish Republic. In 1931, García Lorca was appointed as director of a university student theatre company, Teatro Universitario la Barraca ('The Shack'). This was funded by the Second Republic's Ministry of Education, and it was charged with touring Spain's remotest rural areas in order to introduce audiences to radically modern interpretations of classic Spanish theatre. As well as directing, Lorca also acted. While touring with La Barraca, García Lorca wrote his best-known plays, the 'rural trilogy' of Bodas de sangre ('Blood Wedding'), Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba. He distilled his theories on artistic creation and performance in a famous lecture entitled 'Play and Theory of the Duende', first given in Buenos Aires and Havana in 1933, in which he argued that great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason. La Barraca was the first to produce Lorca's 'rural trilogy' plays. The group's subsidy was cut in half by the new government in 1934, and la Barraca's last performance was in April 1936.

When war broke out in 1936, García Lorca left Madrid for Granada, even though he was aware that he was almost certainly heading toward his death in a city reputed to have the most conservative oligarchy in Andalucía. García Lorca and his brother-in-law, who was also the socialist mayor of Granada, were soon arrested. He was executed, shot by Falange militia on August 19, 1936 and thrown into an unmarked grave somewhere between Víznar and Alfacar, near Granada. There is a large controversy about the motives (personal non-political motives are also suggested) and details of his death. The dossier compiled at Franco's request has yet to surface.

The Franco regime placed a general ban on his work, which was not rescinded until 1953 when a (heavily censored) Obras completas was released. That Obras did not include his late Sonnets of Dark Love, written in November 1935 and performed only for close friends — these were lost until 1983/4 when they were finally published. It was only after Franco's death in 1975 that García Lorca's life and death could be openly discussed in Spain.

Today, García Lorca is honored by a statue prominently located in Madrid's Plaza de Santa Ana.