Jorge Guillen

Jorge Guillén
Sculpture of Jorge Guillén in los Jardines del Poniente de Valladolid
Born	(1893-01-18)18 January 1893 Valladolid, Province of Valladolid, Spain
Died	6 February 1984(1984-02-06) (aged 91) Málaga, Province of Málaga, Spain
Spouse(s)	Germaine Cahen (m. 1924; d. 1947) Irene Mochi-Sismondi (m. 1958)
Children	Claudio Guillén, Teresa Gilman née Guillén
Awards	Premio Cervantes, Premio Internacional Alfonso Reyes, Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía, Ollin Yoliztli Prize

Jorge Guillén y Álvarez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxoɾxe ɣiˈʎen]; 18 January 1893 – 6 February 1984) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic.

In 1957-8 he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. These were published in 1961 under the title ‘’Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain.’’ The final lecture was a tribute to his colleagues in the Generation of ’27. In 1983, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Jorge Guillén was born in Valladolid where he spent his childhood and adolescence. From 1909 to 1911 he lived in Switzerland. He studied at the universities of Madrid – lodging in the Residencia de Estudiantes – and Granada, where he took his licenciatura in philosophy in 1913. His life paralleled that of his friend Pedro Salinas, whom he succeeded as a Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris from 1917 to 1923. While in Paris, he met and, in 1921, married Germaine Cahen. They had two children, a son Claudio born in 1924 who became a noted critic and scholar of comparative literature, and a daughter Teresa who married the Harvard professor Stephen Gilman.

He took his doctorate at the University of Madrid in 1924 with a dissertation on Góngora's notoriously difficult and, at that time, neglected long poem Polifemo. This was also the period when his first poems were starting to be published in España and La pluma. He was appointed to the chair of Spanish Literature at the University of Murcia from 1925 to 1929, where, with Juan Guerrero Ruiz and José Ballester Nicolás, he founded and edited a literary magazine called Verso y Prosa.