Studies in Romance Languages

Modernity and Beyond

Andrew Debicki

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813189932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists.

Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product.

By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism.This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.

1

The Apogee of Modernity in Spain, 1915–1928

One View of Modernity

After examining various definitions of the term modernity up to the mid-nineteenth century, Matei Calinescu emphasized Charles Baudelaire’s use of modern to describe an aesthetic sense of “presentness.” For Calinescu, this offered a new and fruitful way of characterizing a period of literary and cultural history. Baudelaire’s formulation transcended a purely chronological meaning of modernity and stressed, instead, a main goal of the poets of one era: the achievement of timeless immediacy in their works (Calinescu 46–58). Baudelaire thus initiated a poetics that was to underlie Western European letters from the late nineteenth century until at least the 1930s.

Baudelaire’s conception of modernity is also a good initial vantage point from which to look at contemporary Spanish poetry. The poetics on which it was based governed the writings of the important Spanish and Latin American poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Calinescu points out, the most famous Spanish American poet of this time, Rubén Darío, consciously attempted to define a “modernist” artistic renovation based on French influences, “combining the major postromantic trends, parnassian, decadent, and symbolist,” in contrast to the Spanish literature of the time (69). The aestheticism of the Spanish American modernistas was clearly derived from the symbolist conception of the work of art as a unique way of embodying, of making present for then and forever, fundamental human meanings.

This conception indeed constituted a main feature of the symbolist poetics. It was implied in Baudelaire’s ideas about “correspondence.” Going beyond earlier romantic notions of literary correspondences, Baudelaire described how poets give form to new perceptions by establishing relations between diverse elements (Balakian 51–54). That process of giving form to perceptions, in turn, represents a desire to give permanence to human experiences and aesthetic meanings, to antepose a sense of presentness to the flow of time.¹ “The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is not merely due to the beauty of the display, but also to the essential ‘presentness’ of the present.”²

This notion of the poem as a means of making present and hence preserving elusive meanings becomes even clearer in Stéphane Mallarmé’s view of the symbol: “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois-quarts de la juissànce du poème . . . ; le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole: évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme.” (869). {“To merely name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the play [or range] of the poem . . . ; to suggest it, that is the goal. It represents the perfect expression of that mystery that makes a symbol: to evoke an object little by little, so as to reveal a state of soul.”} Mallarmé’s opposition to direct naming in poetry was not merely a way of separating it from everyday expression, but an endeavor to grant it a special role: that of giving form to otherwise incommunicable states of emotion. His “symbol” is a unique way of embodying untranslatable meanings, of making them tangible and present for all future readers and thus rendering them timeless.

This notion of poetry, of its nature as a kind of icon for the preservation and eternalization of elusive meanings and experiences, also underlay the poetics of many Hispanic writers from the latter nineteenth century into the 1920s and even the 1930s. Ricardo Gullón, who developed the broadest definition of Hispanic modernism, indicated that a devotion to poetry as an almost religious task of embodying fleeting experiences binds together all modernist poets, from the late nineteenth-century Spanish Americans Rubén Darío and José Martí to the twentieth-century Spaniards Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado (Gullón 1971, 39–40, 166–67, 189). Such a view of the poem as icon also helps explain Dario’s interest in rhythm and in music as ways of objectifying meaning (Debicki and Doudoroff 39–41).³

Since this view of modern poetry as preservation of meanings was so central to Darío and other Spanish American poets of the turn of the century, and since it connects them both to their contemporaries and to later Spanish poets, it is unfortunate that the term modernismo acquired a much narrower definition in Hispanic criticism. Gullón’s concept of modernism as the defining impulse of a larger era that lasted from the 1880s to about 1940, and a similar formulation of Ivan Schulman (see 9, 14–15), have been rejected, in Hispanic criticism, in favor of a view of modernismo as a specific movement, with two phases: an aestheticist one lasting from about 1885 to about 1895, and a philosophical one extending from 1895 until about 1910. The term postmodernismo, consequently, has been used to describe writers between 1910 and 1920 or so, who in turn give way to vanguardismo in the 1920s.⁴ This narrow view has also motivated many studies that try to differentiate modernismo from the Generation of 1898, usually by contrasting the aesthetic renewal of the former to the thematic renewal of the latter (Diaz Plaja 1951). Even Pedro Salinas, while describing the rejection of literalism and pedantry common to both of these “movements,” treats them as separate (1970, 23–25). All this has produced a canonical view of twentieth-century Hispanic poetry as fragmented into many movements and has obscured the presence of dominant poetic concepts and features that underlie that poetry from the late 1880s until at least the 1930s.

If we adopt a broader view of modernism, more consonant with one generally used in Anglo-American and French criticism, we can take more into account the presence and impact of fundamental attitudes that originate with the symbolists, and better define the poetics and the verse of the major Spanish poets of the earlier twentieth century. In this chapter I will focus on the period between about 1915 and 1928, since it was then that a modernist stance led to an extraordinary flowering of poetry, and that poetry would constitute a canon to which later writings would necessarily respond.

We should remember that this period is generally considered the high point of modernism in Western literature. Describing all its strands or taking into account all the different definitions of modernism would be impossible within the confines of this chapter. I will merely highlight one, which picks up and modifies the symbolist concepts discussed above. From 1912 to about 1917, the imagist poets in England had attempted to capture, in precise form and metaphor, untranslatable meanings and experiences, continuing the symbolist quest for the objectification of meaning.⁵ The 1920s marked the composition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, of many of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, of William Butler Yeats’s late work, of much of the poetry of Paul Valéry in France, as well as the emergence of e.e. cummings and Hart Crane in the United States. In the verse of these poets as well as in Eliot’s essays, we can see a continuation of the symbolist quest, albeit with a more traditionalist hue. Eliot tried to codify the process of objectifying meaning through the concept of the “objective correlative,” outlined in a 1919 essay on Hamlet; he fitted the process of creation and embodiment into a larger view of the literary tradition in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” of 1919 (Eliot 104–8, 21–30). The notion of seizing experience in form had lost some of the lyric, mystical nuances of the early symbolists and had become a systematic critical principle that was to be a cornerstone of the New Criticism. Meanwhile, a complex poetry developed, with new uses of form and allusion that called for new and exact forms of study.

High Modernity in Spain, 1915–1924

Spanish poetry also exemplified the world of high modernity in the decade or so beginning around 1915. Madrid witnessed at this time a gradual opening to artistic currents coming from France that became intensified in the early years of the regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera, which began in 1923. Though the dominant style in poetry reflected the decorative manner of Darío’s early work, a search for new directions, coupled with a liberal and cosmopolitan orientation, pervaded the city’s cultural establishment.⁶

Very important to the city’s cultural life was the Residencia de Estudiantes, directed by Manuel B. Cossío. Cossío espoused idealistic views, derived from the liberal thought of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Learning). He dreamed of a society elevated by the arts and did all he could to bring it into existence. From 1910 on, the Residencia housed a number of poets, including Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Rafael Alberti; published important works like Antonio Machado’s complete poems to date (1917); and served as a center for poetry readings, artistic events, and lectures by foreign artists and scholars. Meanwhile, beginning in 1915, José Ortega y Gasset directed the magazine Revista de España, through which he conveyed his ideals of a European-based culture and commented on artistic currents coming from abroad. In the next decade Ortega directed the famous Revista de Occidente, which between 1923 and 1936 published the best work of the writers of the Generation of 1927, as well as older ones. The vitality of the Madrid cultural scene of this era also becomes clear when we read the Gaceta Literaria (1927–32), a newspaper-format magazine that reported in some depth on all aesthetic happenings in Spain and in the rest of continental Europe. Parallel developments were also taking place in Barcelona (see Díaz Plaja 1975, 137–41) and in other cities; a number of small magazines throughout Spain reflected the vitality of the literary scene in the 1920s. The most important poetry of Spain’s modernity emerged in this climate of renewal.⁷

Probably the best-known poet of these years was Antonio Machado, born in 1875 and generally considered a representative of the Generation of 1898 because of his treatment of the past glory and the current decay of Spain in his Campos de Castilla (“Fields of Castile,” 1912, 1917). Yet Machado emphasized a universal view of the poet as one who embodies basic human experiences in words. Machado’s oft-quoted view of poetry as “palabra esencial en el tiempo” {“essential expression in time”}, his idea that poetry seeks meanings opposed to those of logic, and his definition of the modern poetic quest as a search for values at once individual and timeless all situate his poetics within the symbolist trajectory (Machado 71).⁸

A more detailed look at Machado’s poetics reveals many ambiguities, especially in view of his propensity for multiple perspectives and for paradox, and his use of heteronyms. For my purposes, however, what matters is Machado’s symbolist filiation. Whatever its outcome, his struggle to define poetry as a way of dealing with temporal existence—a struggle that culminated in the discussions embedded in the De un cancionero apócrifo (“From an Apocryphal Anthology” composed between 1923 and 1936)—places him within that tradition to a far greater degree than common critical opinion has allowed.⁹

Machado’s actual poetry also fits within the symbolist tradition, as J.M. Aguirre has demonstrated (168–69, 181–87). This becomes clear if we adopt a modernist (perhaps we should say New Critical) perspective and borrow a critical term from Eliot. Beginning with Soledades, galerías, y otros poemas (“Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems,” 1907) and throughout Campos de Castilla, Machado’s verse makes natural scenes and elements into correlatives of subjective attitudes, always avoiding the decorativeness that had characterized the modernistas. In poem 32 from the former book, a tightly presented landscape embodies a negative mood:

Las ascuas de un crepúsculo morado

detrás del negro cipresal humean . . .

En la glorieta en sombra está la fuente

con su alado y desnudo Amor de piedra,

que sueña mudo. En la marmórea taza

reposa el agua muerta. [Machado 95–96]

{The embers of a purple dusk smolder behind the black cypress grove. The fountain, with its winged, naked stone cupid, lies in the shadowy plaza. In the marble cup, still water rests.}

All aspects of the description—the image of dusk as embers, the dark colors, the presence of trees that generally line Spanish cemeteries, the reduction of human life to a mute statue, the still water, the word muerta—engender a sense of time passing and suggest finitude and death.

In like fashion, Machado’s sixth section of “Campos de Soria,” from Campos de Castilla, alternates two types of description to reflect its speaker’s double attitude toward the ancient city. A distanced and idealized outlook focuses on the city’s silhouette and makes us feel its historical grandeur; meanwhile a pragmatic one sketches its decaying walls and deserted streets, populated only by howling dogs. These poems confirm Carlos Bousoño’s notion that Machado constructs “bisemic” symbols to objectify moods and to make fundamental experiences out of specific personal referents, in Soledades, and out of civic topics, in Campos de Castilla (Bousoño 1966, 139–81).

Although Machado’s Nuevas canciones (“New Songs”), written between 1917 and 1930, contains poems with a more conceptual bent, the poems are also fine ones in which the sense of time passing is expressed in concrete symbols (see Sánchez Barbudo 1969, 382). Aguirre has suggested, in fact, that Machado’s poetry actually points ahead to the poetics of the next generation: “El adelgazamiento y la simplificación de su vocabulario tiene mucho que ver con las ideas de la época sobre la poesía pura” (373). {“The tightening and simplification of his vocabulary have much to do with the ideas of the period concerning pure poetry.”}

This connection between Machado and the Generation of 1927 may seem surprising, in view of the opposition generally established between them, and of Machado’s negative comments about the work of younger poets. In the same essay in which he defined poetry as “palabra esencial en el tiempo,” he claimed to disagree with their use of images “más en función conceptual que emotiva” (71) {“in a conceptual rather than an emotive way”}. This only indicates, however, that Machado was not sympathetic to the tighter and more spare poetry of Jorge Guillén, Federico García Lorca, and others of their generation. He could not see that these poets were carrying forward the same quest for the embodiment of experience in verbal form that had been fundamental to his own work.

From the perspective of the 1990s, of course, we tend to question the very possibility of “embodying” meanings in language, without allowing for differences in reader perspectives, for the instability of signs, for historical circumstances. Today it is difficult (or pointless) to argue the permanent value of B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Apogee of Modernity in Spain, 1915–1928
• 2. Currents in Spanish Modernity, 1915–1939
• 3. After the War, 1940–1965
• 4. New Directions for Spanish Poetry, 1956–1970
• 5. The Postmodern Time of the Novísimos, 1966–1980
• 6. The Evolution of Postmodern Poetry, 1978–1990
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index