Miguel Hernández
Miguel Hernández was a prominent Spanish poet born in 1910 in Orihuela, Spain, into a poor family. As the second of seven children, he faced a challenging upbringing, including familial violence and the demands of farm work. Despite these hardships, Hernández developed a deep love for poetry and literature, which he pursued against his father's wishes. His early experiences in nature and daily life at home inspired much of his poetry. He became involved in local theater and led a socialist organization, reflecting his engagement with social issues of the time. Hernández's literary career flourished during the Spanish Civil War, where he supported the loyalist cause through his work. However, his life was marked by instability, as he faced imprisonment and censorship, ultimately leading to his death from tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-one. Today, Miguel Hernández is celebrated as one of Spain's greatest poets, recognized for his contributions to literature during a turbulent period in Spanish history.
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Miguel Hernández
Poet
- Born: October 30, 1910
- Birthplace: Orihuela, Spain
- Died: March 28, 1942
- Place of death: Alicante, Spain
Biography
Miguel Hernández was born in 1910 in Orihuela, a town in in southeastern Spain, to Concepción Gilabert Giner de Hernández and her husband, Miguel Hernández Sánchez, a poor herdsman and dealer in sheep and goats. Hernández was the second of seven children, including his older brother Vicente, his sisters Elvira and Encarnación, and three siblings who did not survive. Hernández’s timid mother tried to protect him from his sometimes violent father, but throughout his life the poet suffered from headaches that he blamed on his father’s blows.
When Hernández was three years old, the family moved to a poor district, yet their property included a stable, a well, a large garden, and an orchard of mulberry, lemon, and fig trees. From the time he was quite young, Hernández was required to work around the house and in the stable, and the garden became a place of escape and refuge. His parents assumed that he would eventually take over the family business, so Hernández was forced to tend his father’s flocks and sell the milk the animals produced. His early poems reflect these intimate experiences with nature.
At age nine, Hernández entered Escuela del Ave María, a school annex for poor children of the Colegio de Santo Domingo de Orihuela, a Jesuit-run, upper-middle-class private college. Here Hernández developed a love of Spanish drama and poetry, and he was an excellent student. In 1923, when he was thirteen, Hernández was honored by an invitation to study at the college, but he was forced to withdraw in March, 1925, because he was needed to help tend his father’s growing herd. Hernández was devastated, but despite his father’s opposition to his educational and literary pursuits, he was determined to become a poet. He read voraciously, borrowing books from libraries and his contemporaries. At the age of eighteen, he started writing simple poems using images from his daily work, such as his poem “En cucilillas, ordeño una cabrita y un sueño” (squatting on my heels, I milk my goat and my dream).
Hernández helped form a theater group called the Farsa, after the drama publication of the same name. His first poem, “Pastoril,” written in his beloved orchard, was published in the journal Pueblo de Orihuela on January 13, 1930. Although he now was a published poet, he still struggled to survive. During these lean years, Hernández became involved with a socialist organization in Orihuela, serving as its president, and in the spring of 1931, he won first prize in a regional poetry competition in Elche. While working as a clerk in 1932, Hernández saw Josefina Manresa, a seamstress, among a crowd of girls at a carnival and, after a lengthy courtship, they married.
His later poetry supported the loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, and Hernández spent his adult life in and out of prison, worrying about his destitute wife and child. Access to his work was denied due to censorship, and Hernández died in prison of tuberculosis at age thirty-one. Nonetheless, he is considered one of poets who made Madrid a literary hub in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Against enormous odds, he triumphed over poverty and adversity to emerge as one of Spain’s greatest poets.