In a volume over 270 pages, published by the University of Granada under the title “Jaime Gil de Biedma and the Anglo-American tradition”, teacher Andrew Samuel Walsh, of the Modern Language Centre of the academic institution of Granada, aims to follow the traces of the Anglo-American tradition in the work of the poet from Barcelona Jaime Gil de Biedma, “a brief work –according to the author of this book– but extraordinarily influential, made up of only ninety seven poems written throughout twenty-eight years. Practically all comentarists agree that there is an important presence of Anglo-Saxon writers in the work of the poet from Barcelona and, in our opinion, there is certain tend to drop a mountain of distinguished Anglo-American names without corroborating such ambitious affirmations.”
According to Professor Antonio Chicharro Chamorro, author of the prologue of this book “is one of the best-founded contributions from today’s comparatism, European coined –in this sense the book is a beautiful and joyful sign of these times of European construction beyond the economic aspects- directed to the knowledge of the active presence of the Anglo-American literary thought and culture in Gil de Biedma’s poetic project, contributing in a very effective way to fill with sense and foundation what at the end of the day had become a critics´ commonplace, and little else, when they talked about the weight of the Anglo-American tradition in Gil de Biedma´s work. ”The poet from Barcelona was characterized, according to the author of this book, not only by his literary anglophilia, “but also by certain English temperament that drove him to connect and contrast Spanish cultural values with those he had started to understand during his stay in Oxford in 1953. This stay in the English University city was precisely the starting point of a lasting anglophilia; the poet from Barcelona evoked with nostalgia his life in Oxford in an essay titled Wellington Place, written in 1983 and read with a deep emotion by the poet as a culmination of his lecture-reading at the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students Residence) in Madrid in 1988.”
Gil de Biedma liked, according to the author of the book, to define himself as a product of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition and, without doubt, English culture, even in the most trivial social signs and seemingly insignificant, was a very important part of his “impossible inclination to myth.”
Reference: Prof. Andrew Samuel Walsh.
Modern Language Centre. University of Granada.
Phone numbers: 958 17 13 11
E-mail: aswalsh@ugr.es
