Jorge Guillén belonged to the remarkable Spanish Generation of 1927, which boasted such poets as Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and the Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre. The Spanish Civil War, initially a military rebellion against the Republican regime in 1936, dispersed most of the leading poets, writers, artists, and musicians into exile. Lorca was killed by the insurgents; Alberti went first to Argentina and then to Italy; and Guillén and Salinas came to teach at universities in the United States. The name "Generation of 1927" came about because some of their most important works appeared in or close to that year, which also marked the third centenary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora, whom they admired and emulated. Lorca and Alberti were from Andalusia, in the South, while Guillén and Salinas were...