UPROOTED POETRY: ORIGIN, CHARACTERISTICS AND REPRESENTATIVES - LITERATURE - 2025

The uprooted poetry was a form of literary expression that was created to convey the reality of the feelings of the different Spanish intellectuals during the postwar era. After the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the first generation of thinkers of that historical moment rebelled against the established parameters of traditional poetry, which they called: “rooted poetry”.

It is important to be clear about the division of the poetic class of those years, which made reference to the two sides of the Civil War. Those right-wing poets, who represented "rooted poetry", and their opponents, the writers of "rootless poetry." These names were given by Dámaso Alonso.

Portrait of Dámaso Alonso, who introduced the term "uprooted poetry." Source: Josep Pla-Narbona, via Wikimedia Commons

The uprooted poetry was a poetry that did not rely on the experiential referred to religion, country, politics or family, as was traditional. It was more existential and referred to the anguish experienced during the 1940s.

In 1944, this lyrical manifestation was welcomed in the Espadaña magazine, which contained the highest representatives of uprooted poetry.

Origin

If the origin of uprooted poetry has to be located in a historical moment, its true beginning occurred in 1944, with the appearance of the Espadaña magazine, founded in León by the poet and critic Eugenio de Nora and the poet Victoriano Crémer. In that same year the book Hijos de la Ira, by Dámaso Alonso, came to light.

The movement was born from the existentialism of the moment, facing religiosity and faith, based on the anguish and desolation of the horrors of war and its inheritance of injustice.

The ideas of Dámaso Alonso

The renowned writer clearly described his feeling and intention as follows:

“For others, the world is a chaos and anguish, and poetry is a frantic search for order and anchor. Yes, others of us are very far from all harmony and all sincerity ”.

Meanwhile, in his book Children of Wrath, he speaks to injustice in this way:

“From what chasm are you standing, black shadow?

What are you looking for?

…

You can hurt the meat.

You won't bite my heart

Never in my heart

Queen of the World".

External connection of uprooted poetry

In 1946, Eugenio de Nora, co-founder of Espadaña, clandestinely wrote Pueblo Cautivo. In this work, the writer connected with Pablo Neruda's line of the 30s, alluding to workers' problems, which is why he ran into the censorship of his time.

Proel

Vicente Aleixandre, representative of uprooted poetry. Source: Rev. Firebird, no 2,, via Wikimedia Commons

Faced with the magazines supported by the Franco regime, such as Escorial and Garcilaso, two other uprooted magazines were born. In Santander emerged Proel (1944) and in Valencia appeared Corcel (1943). Both welcomed uprooted poetry as a form of existential expression, more attached to reality and its problems.

characteristics

Uprooted poetry had the following characteristics:

From a stylistic point of view

- His language is direct and has the intention of narrative force.

- Give more importance to content than structure.

- Use the free verse and the verse in terms of meter.

- He also uses the sonnet as a resource repeatedly.

- Has a non-verse style.

- Much use of encasing.

- Contains colloquial turns, exploiting the language of the people to reach more people and more deeply in the collective.

From the thematic point of view

The poetic form maintained a line of critical religiosity, since its representatives considered that God had abandoned humanity. Loneliness and suffering were highlighted, and the train of thought ran along the fear of living and dying in a world ravaged by war.

Uprooted poetry coexisted with the philosophical current of existentialism, championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, which influenced all of Europe after the Second World War. As for the prose, it is parallel to the tremendous, developed mainly by Camilo José Cela in his work La Familia de Pascual Duarte, from 1942.

Representatives and works

Dámaso Alonso (1898-1990)

Graduated in law and philosophy and letters, from an early age he was interested in poetry, especially when he learned about Rubén Darío's writings. In his youth he made a great friendship with the poet Vicente Aleixandre, and in the student residence he had a relationship with contemporaries such as García Lorca, Buñuel and Dalí.

Literarily he was part of the Generation of 27 and the first postwar poetic generation. His poetic work lasted for about sixty years, starting from Pure Poems, Poemillas de ciudad (1918), to Doubts and Love about the Supreme Being (1985).

He was the founder of the Biblioteca Hispánica Románica collection and also director of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Plays

His most outstanding works within uprooted poetry are:

- Sons of Wrath (1944).

- Dark News (1944).

- Man and God (1955).

- Three sonnets on the Castilian language (1958).

- Chosen poems (1969).

- Poetic Anthology (1980).

- Anthology of our monstrous world. Doubt and love about the Supreme Being (1985).

Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984)

He was a Spanish poet of the so-called Generation of 27 and, in addition, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Between 1939 and 1943 he wrote his work Shadow of Paradise, which was one of the fundamental books of uprooted poetry.

For his renovating way of writing during the interwar period and the change that he introduced in Spanish poetry, he received, in 1977, the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Plays

- Swords as lips (1932).

- Shadow of paradise (1944).

- On the death of Miguel Hernández (1948).

- World alone (1950).

- Surrealist poetry (1971).

- Sound of war (1971).

Victorian Crémer (1906-2009)

Poet, novelist and essayist from Burgos. At 16 years of age, he published his first poem in the weekly Chronicle of León, the city where he lived practically all his life. Already in 1933 he denoted his tendency towards what later became uprooted poetry, when he published the work Viacrucis (worker romance) in the Madrid newspaper La Tierra.

He was co-founder of Espadaña magazine, after getting out of jail. His poetry stood out for the denunciation of injustice and the desire for solidarity. His work Tendiendo el volar (1938) received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2008.

Plays

- Sound touch (1944).

- Paths of my blood (1947).

- The lost hours (1949).

- Lonely time (1962).

- Dialogue for a solo (1963).

- Far from this bitter rain (1974).

- The resistance of the spike (1997).

- Any past time (2003).

- The last horseman (2008).

Carlos Bousoño (1923-2015)

He was an Asturian poet, university professor of literature and literary critic. In 1951 he published, together with Dámaso Alonso (who was his friend and teacher), his great book Theory of Poetic Expression. He gathered his poetic work in 1998 under the title Spring of death.

In 1945 he published his first collection of poems, Subida al amor, which contained an existentialist and rootless streak. In 1988 she received the National Poetry Prize for her work Metaphor of the lawlessness. His style evolved between realism and symbolism, becoming less sober.

Plays

- Ascent to love (1945).

- Spring of death (1946).

- Towards another light (1952).

- Night of the sense (1957).

- Invasion of reality (1962).

- Ode in the ash (1967).

- At the same time as the night (1971).

- Metaphor of lawlessness (1988).

- The eye of the needle (1993).

Gabriel Celaya (1911-1991)

He was a Spanish poet born in Guipúzcoa, belonging to the generation of postwar poets. He studied engineering, but living in the Residencia de los Estudiantes, in Madrid, he met Federico García Lorca and other intellectuals who influenced him to continue in literature.

During the Spanish Civil War he fought on the Republican side and was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Palencia. In 1946 he abandoned his career and dedicated himself to literature. In that year he published his book Tentativas, which had an existentialist character and where he signed for the first time as Gabriel Celaya.

His style evolved based on a compendium of the styles of 20th century Spanish poetry, for which, once the uprooted model was exhausted, his writing took other directions.

Plays

- The closed solitude (1947).

- The beginning without end (1949).

- Things as they are (1949).

- The rest is silence (1952).

- Dead road (1954).

- The resistances of the diamond (1957).

- Cantata in Aleixandre (1959).

Blas de Otero (1916-1979)

He was a Spanish poet, born in Bilbao and whose greatest literary development was noted in the currents of social poetry and intimate poetry. Otero came to such trends as an evolution of uprooted poetry with which he was related from 1945 on.

In that year, Blas de Otero suffered a great depressive crisis, the consequence of which was a change in the two central characters of all his work, who were: me (the poet) and you (God).

Blas de Otero (second from the right side), together with Luis Castresana, Pío Fernández and Rafael Morales, in 1965. Source: Manuel María Fernández Gochi, via Wikimedia Commons

In this change, God was an absent interlocutor, while the "I" found itself destroyed, ruined, like a city by war. Then, Otero realized that there are other men with the same problems and wanted to capture it.

Thus he entered his existentialist stage, influenced like so many others by the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, without having a special inclination towards Marxist thought. His work stood out for the use of free verse and verse, and he is the author of Poetics, the shortest poem in the Spanish language.

Plays

- Fiercely Human Angel (1945).

- Redoubling of conscience (1951).

- I ask for peace and the word (1955).

- Old (1958). Faked and true stories (1970).

References

1. Uprooted poetry. (2019). Spain: Wikipedia. Recovered from: es.wikipedia.org.
2. Pérez Rosado, M. (S. f.). Postwar Spanish Poetry. (N / A): Spanish Arts. Recovered from: spanisharts.com.
3. Postwar poetry. (2017). (N / A): Castilian corner. Recovered from: rincónocastellano.com.
4. López Asenjo, M. (2013). Rooted and uprooted poetry. (N / A): Master of language. Recovered from: masterdelengua.com.
5. (2014). Uprooted poetry. (N / A): The guide. Recovered from: lengua.laguia2000.com.