[1] He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature,[2] and he won numerous prizes and awards.

[6] As a result, Alberti's father was no more than a commercial traveller for the company, always away on business, as the general agent for Spain for brands of sherry and brandy that had, before, only been exported to the UK.

During his first year, Alberti was a model student but his growing awareness of how differently the boarders were treated from the day-boys, together with the other ranking systems operated by the Jesuits, inspired in him a desire to rebel.

In Madrid, he again neglected his formal studies, preferring to go to the Casón del Buen Retiro and the Prado, where he spent many hours copying paintings and sculptures.

[12] In 1921, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and he spent many months recuperating in a sanatorium in the Sierra de Guadarrama where he read avidly among the works of Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez,[13] as well as various Ultraist and Vanguardista writers.

The book that resulted from this activity, Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Dry Land), submitted at the last minute, won the National Poetry Award in 1925.

During further visits to the Residencia - it seems that he never actually became a member himself - he met Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, and Gerardo Diego along with many other cultural icons such as Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí.

The kind of folkloric/cancionero poetry he had used in Marinero was also employed in two further collections – La amante ('The Mistress') and El alba del alhelí ('Dawn of the Wallflower') – but with the approach of the Góngora Tercentenary he began to write in a style that was not only more formally demanding but which also enabled him to be more satirical and dramatic.

Alberti himself was present at the meeting at a Madrid cafe in April 1926, when the plans for the tercentenary were first sketched out - along with Pedro Salinas, Melchor Fernández Almagro and Gerardo Diego.

His next collections, Sermones y moradas ('Sermons and mansions') and Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos (' I was a fool and what I have seen has made me two fools'), together with a play El hombre deshabitado ('The Empty Man'), all showed signs of a psychological breakdown which, to the surprise of everyone who knew him, had overwhelmed Alberti and from which he was only saved by his elopement with the writer and political activist María Teresa León in either 1929 or 1930 – again his memoirs are not clear on the date.

[20] The inference from his memoirs is that she played a key role, along with his continuing bitter memories of the Colegio, in the process that converted the easy-going, carousing bohemian of the early books into the committed Communist of the 1930s.

But when Gil Robles came to power in 1933, the violent attacks that Alberti launched against him in the magazine Octubre ('October'), which he had founded with María Teresa, led to a period of exile.

[24] During the Spanish Civil War, Alberti became the poetic voice of the left and he made frequent broadcasts from the capital during the Siege of Madrid by the Francoist armies, composing poems in praise of the defenders of the city.

[28] After the defeat of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces and the disbandment of the Republic by the rebel faction, Alberti and María fled to Paris via Oran and moved into an apartment together with Pablo Neruda on the Quai de l'Horloge.

Shortly after his return Alberti was elected deputy for Cádiz in the constituent Congress of the Spanish parliament on the Communist Party Ticket.

Marinero shows a compendium of different influences: the style of Gil Vicente and the mediaeval cancioneros, to which Alonso had introduced him; a highly organised, formal, baroque style derived from Rubén Darío's Modernismo - and ultimately from the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, Pedro Espinosa, and possibly Góngora;[32] along with traces of Ultraism.

He was working on the poems which would form El alba when he was invited by his brother, who had succeeded their father as a wine-salesman, to take a trip with him to the Cantabrian coast.

In La amante, his brother is replaced by the figure of an imaginary girl-friend and he assumes the persona of a troubadour, writing short and generally light-hearted verses about the sights they saw.

El alba, on the other hand, was written mainly during holidays he spent with two of his married sisters in Málaga and Rute, a claustrophobic Andalusian mountain village.

He rejects some of the folkloric influences of the previous two works and picks up again the baroque forms, such as the sonnets and tercets, and also the Ultraist thematic material of Marinero.

The nymphs, shepherdesses and mythological figures of renaissance and Baroque poetry are brought into contact with department stores and other aspects of modern life only to appear banal.

At one desperate moment Platko was attacked so furiously by the players of the Real that he was covered with blood and lost consciousness a few feet from his position, but with his arms still wrapped around the ball.

He contrasts the confinement of the classroom with the freedom of the seashore, the excitement and novelty of the cinema with the boredom of lessons, the conventions of traditional literature and ideas with the revolution of radio, the aeroplane, the telephone.

Picking up on the sense of unease that hangs over Cal y canto, Alberti now begins to mine a vein of deep and anguished introspection.

An unhappy love affair seems to have been the immediate catalyst but the pit of despair into which Alberti plunged was peopled also by deeper-rooted shadows of his life, notably recollections of his rebellious childhood and the hell-fire sermons of the Jesuits at the Colegio, a friend's suicide, and a full awareness of his own position at the age of 25, misunderstood by his family, penniless, still living at home (it was only after he met María Teresa that he finally moved out) and with no other way of earning a living other than through his poetry.

In this black mood, The first section of Sobre los ángeles (1927-8) consists almost entirely of poems on the loss of love and the poet's consequent feeling of being emptied.

Written in the aftermath of the exhilaration of being involved in the anti-Primo de Rivera riots,[43] whilst still impenetrably dense at times, it shows the beginning of the socially aware poetry that would be the next direction he would take.

During his exile, Alberti took up painting again and began a series of poems to draw together his thinking on this subject, to which he continued to add over a period of many years.

He also recalls his mother, his friends – especially Vicente Aleixandre who was too ill to leave Madrid during the Civil War - the death of Lorca and he also supplies a moving tribute to his wife.

[47] Shortly afterwards, he began to write a ballad on the life of Fermín Galán, an army captain who had tried to launch a coup to establish a Spanish Republic in December 1930 and who was executed by firing-squad.