Luis Cernuda Bidón was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.

Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars". He was part of the Generation of '27.