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.[1] 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.[2] This was also the period when his first poems were starting to be published in España and La pluma.[1] 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.
He continued to visit the Residencia de Estudiantes although his academic responsibilities limited his attendance to vacations. This allowed him to make the acquaintance of the younger members of the Generation – such as Rafael Alberti and Federico Garcia Lorca. He became a regular correspondent of the latter and, on the occasion of a visit by Lorca to the Arts Club of Valladolid in April 1926, Guillén delivered an introduction to a poetry reading which was a considered and sympathetic appraisal of a man whom he considered to be already a poetic genius, although he had only published one collection.[3]
