Jaime Gil de Biedma

Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929-1990) was a Spanish post-Civil War poet.

He was born in Barcelona in 1929. He deliberately stopped writing poetry some ten years before his death. He insisted that the character he had invented, the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, as opposed to the respectable bourgeois businessman of the same name, had nothing left to say and he refused to go on playing the role of a poet in literary society.

Homosexuality

As a homosexual in a strongly conservative environment, Jaime Gil de Biedma suffered discrimination all his life. Nevertheless, he did not hide his sexual orientation and displayed it openly in his poetry. He was rejected for membership of the then illegal Spanish Communist Party, allegedly because Franco's dictatorship could use his sexuality to threaten him if he were discovered to be a communist.

Poet Rafael Alberti, when he was a member of the jury for the Cervantes Prize (Spain's most important literary prize), tried to award the prize to Gil de Biedma. Some believe that this was because of his sexual orientation.

English influence

Among Spanish readers, he is commonly considered one of the most consummate anglophiles in the field of contemporary peninsular literature. This Anglophilia was initiated when he first read T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (translated in 1952).

He was also a considerable Francophile as befitted a young Spaniard of his elevated social class, bearing in mind that Spanish society had always been notoriously 'afrancesado' until well into the 20th century. This state of affairs begin to change under the influence of poets like Gil de Biedma and Luis Cernuda. His lifelong adherence to and assimilation of Anglo-American culture was consolidated by his studies in Oxford in 1953 where he read T.S. Eliot for the first time in English (along with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender), thus beginning a lifelong fascination with the work of the Anglo-American poet. Moreover, the long periods spent in the largely Anglophone circles of Manila would also contribute to his Anglophile literary sensibility and on numerous occasions he would declare England to be his 'segunda patria', his second country, and would also say that he was 'in great measure, a product of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. Even though, also shows conscious relations with Spanish and French tradition.

Generation of '50'

Poetically, Gil de Biedma belongs to the group of poets known as the 'Generation of '50', a loose term referring to poets who come from the cultivated social realism in the wake of the Civil War. While earlier post-war poets focuse strongly on social issues and lack attention to the poem itself, poets from Generation of '50' as Gil de Biedma, Ángel González, J. A. Valente or F. Brines, while still concerned with democracy or class struggle, are aware about the literary character of their work. They all introduce in Spain, partly because of the late Cernuda's influence, what Langbaum called 'poetry of experience', main poetic trend in Spain from the 1980s. In their writings from 1950 to 1970, at least, they all try to rearrange intellectually immediate experience, by the means of a fictional-self.

Common topics

In his early poems, he displays a strong criticism of Spanish dictatorship, titling his first important publication Compañeros de viaje, after a Trotskyist expression for Communist sympathizers. Gil de Biedma was known for his hard-partying ways and his unrepentant social life, and addressed the schism between public and private personae in several famous poems, arguably the most well-known being 'Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma' ('Against Jaime Gil de Biedma') or 'Después de la muerte de Jaime Gil de Biedma' ('After the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma'). Along with Francisco Brines, he helped to reinvigorate homoerotic topics on poetry, probably inspired by the exiled Luis Cernuda.

Bibliography

• Versos a Carlos Barral (1952)
• Segun sentencia del tiempo (1953)
• Companeros de viaje (1959)
• Moralidades (1966)
• Poemas póstumos (1969)
• Las personas del verbo (Complete Poetry -1982)

Trivia

Despite of being an important homosexual and leftist poet, Gil de Biedma is uncle to the highly conservative politician Esperanza Aguirre.

He died in 1990 of AIDS.