Sánchez Mejías was very close to the Generation of ’27. In addition to being a bullfighter, he was a patron of the arts, writer, playwright, lecturer, president of the Red Cross in Seville, president of the Betis soccer team… Sánchez Mejías meant for the poets of ’27 the fascination for bullfighting as a vehicle of artistic expression.
Bullfighting attracted almost all its members, but especially José Bergamín, Rafael Alberti (who also dedicated an elegy to the bullfighter and another, at the request of Sánchez Mejías himself, to the memory of the bullfighter Joselito, who died in Talavera seven years earlier), Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Gerardo Diego and Federico García Lorca.
In the case of Federico, the following phrase remains: “What would become of the Spanish spring, of our blood and our language, if the dramatic clarions of the bullfight were to cease to sound”. In a statement, a year before his death, he had already said: “Bullfighting is probably the greatest vital poetic wealth of Spain”. The artistic union of the friends had been linked forever.