City and public space in the poetry of the mid-century: Ángel González, Carmen Martín Gaite and María Beneyto

Abstract

The work proposes to study the poetic work of three central authors of the so-called “Spanish mid-century” –Ángel González, María Beneyto and Carmen Martín Gaite– whose centenary of birth is commemorated this year. In their productions it is possible to observe different modulation around spaces and the relationship of the poetic subject with the diverse territories that it inhabits and poetizes. From the “urban landscapes” of the Asturian, which determine a matrix of urban poetry that runs through his poetry collections in a historicist key, both as a testimonial and ironic one; passing through the suffocating interior and provincial worlds that clearly mark the initial poems of Martín Gaite and end up in the New York city as a site of identity searches; to the vein of urban poetry that renews in Beneyto’s work the plural facets of the subject that determined her early work, and turns towards the city, its actors and spaces most relegated in the social line of her production. Movements and displacements that concern both his and her poetic sayings and the place of the author and the female authors in the sociological map, determining their figures as writers in the literary field and, in the case of Beneyto and Martín Gaite, their place as women and as poets in the complex post-war cultural field.