2023 Author: Jake Johnson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 23:11
The poet José Agustín Goytisolomixes colloquial language with irony in his poetry. As a member of the Barcelona School, he follows the poetic line of Gil de Biedma in exposing his own experiencecombined, in his case, with aspects of social complaint. Belonging to a family of writers, he was the first of the Goytisolo brothers to achieve fame. In a nationalist bombardment he lost his mother, a tragic event that marked the poet forever. Goytisolo pays homage to her mother by naming her daughter after her, to whom he will dedicate one of the author's most famous poems:“Words for Julia”. He finished his law studies in the capital of Spain, Madrid, and it is there where he had contact with other poets of the time such as Valente or Caballero Bonald and also with novelists of the stature of Carmen Martín Gaite or Martín Santos, with whom he shared political ideas, they belonged to the Communist Party, and nights full of bohemia and alcohol.
Regarding his work, we will begin by saying that he received the Boscán award in 1956 with his work Salmos al viento; Previously, he had already won some minor award such as the Adonais. Later, in 1959, he won the Ausias March Award for the bookClarity. After these successes, Goytisolo suffered a kind of creative crisis and, in 1961, he compiled his poems in the work Decisive Years.
ThemeSocial occupies a large part of his next book, Something Happens, from 1968. In it, the conception of poetry as knowledge is also omnipresent. He later published the works Under toleranceand Taller de Arquitectura, in the years 1973 and 1977 respectively. Already in the eighties, we have the titles Of time and oblivion and On circumstances. In the nineties he published La noche es propitious, in this book love is the protagonist of all the poems that compose it and it is dedicated to a poet who also sang about love, Peter Salina. The book is thus clearly in consonance with that poetry of experience prevailing in his generation. All the poems dedicated to the figure of the mother were collected in 1993 in the same book en titled Elegías a Julia Gay. In 1994, the work appears As the night trains, where the poet, with his melancholy verses, invites the reader to reflect and meditate. His last books of poems were also written in the nineties, specifically in 1995, when he published Cuadernos de El Escorial and in 1997, when Las horamadas appeared., a book in which Goytisolo offers the reader a biography in the form of annotated images.
José Agustín Goytisolo was a man of extreme sensitivity that would produce a state of suffering close to depression that would lead him to suicide. But along with this gray part, there was in the poet another part that loved life, drink, excesses, apart that enjoyed and enjoyed life sharing joys and smiles. He was the first of the poets of his generation to achieve success, but when other poets such as Valente, Biedma or Claudio Rodríguez emerged, he was unfairly relegated to the background.
