“Damn You”. The Poetry of Franco’s Prisons Facing with Censorship

Abstract

The rules that restricted literary writing in the prisons of the first Franco regime are quite undefined. We will study how prison poetic works were received by censors inside and outside prisons, and how their authors got around these obstacles to create and disseminate them. In the face of the legal framework and the outstanding cases of repression of these texts, we will highlight the dissimulation mechanisms to obviate the penitentiary censorship. We will also analyze the censorship reports of some published prison collections of poems (such as those of José Luis Gallego), the dissemination of propaganda verses, as well as testimonies about their semi-clandestine dissemination to show that the poetic genre was not as censored as might be expected.