Modernism in Literature: Key Features and Authors
1. Modernism: Defining Features
Definition: Modernism, a cultural movement spanning all arts, emerged between 1880 and World War I, challenging 19th-century aesthetics and reflecting a spiritual crisis. It influenced later authors and trends, emphasizing beauty, the pursuit of ideals, and a rejection of mediocrity. In Hispanic literature, Modernism began in Latin America with José Martí and Rubén Darío, expressing decadence through skepticism, pessimism, and societal discontent.
General Characteristics
Modernist aesthetics rejected the everyday, seeking beauty and formal perfection. Key features include:
- Love of Elegance: Use of luxurious materials like gold and gems, and rare language (mythology, historical figures, musical terms), enriching it with foreign words, archaisms, and neologisms.
- Symbolism: Condensing meaning into figures or words (e.g., blue for sky and dreams, the swan for the poet).
Themes
- Evasion: Escape from the present to distant pasts or exotic lands.
- Exoticism: Seeking beauty and truth in the exotic, both spatially and temporally.
- Cosmopolitanism: Longing for the aristocratic and other cultures (Paris as a key city).
- Spiritualism and Eroticism: A passion for the mysterious.
Language and Style
Poetic language evokes sensory experiences through words, similar to light, color, and music in other arts. Authors use colors, precious objects, sound effects (alliteration, musical allusions), and refined aromas (flowers, plants). This sensory focus leads to ornamental adjectives, evocative images, symbols, and synesthesia. New meters and stanzas, some from France or revived from obsolescence, are employed.
2. Key Figures in Modernism
Rubén Darío
Nicaraguan poet (1867) whose work, Azul… (1888), marked the beginning of Modernist poetry. Prosas profanas y otros poemas (1896) showcased modernist art’s aristocratic nature, filled with artifice, beauty, symbolism (the swan), erotic elements, and verse experimentation. In Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905), pessimism and religious anguish replaced earlier enthusiasm.
Hispanic vs. Spanish Modernism
American Modernism, older and purer, focused on external beautification. Spanish Modernism, influenced by the American movement, was more intimate and symbolic, emphasizing suggestion and sensory experience over external brilliance. It was influenced by Bécquer, leading to intimate, sentimental poetry. Key figures include the Machado brothers (Antonio and Manuel) and Juan Ramón Jiménez, promoted by the magazine Helios. Valle-Inclán is notable in prose. Early 20th-century works include Manuel Machado’s Alma (1902), Antonio Machado’s Soledades (1903), and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Arias tristes and Jardines lejanos.
3. Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
Machado’s work combines Modernism and the Generation of ’98. Educated at the Free Institution of Teaching, he held a liberal ideology. After his wife Leonor Izquierdo’s death in 1912, he experienced profound depression. Later, he became politically radicalized, sympathizing with the working class. The Spanish Civil War led him into exile, and he died in Collioure, France.
Key Works
- Soledades, Galerías y otros poemas (1907): While not strictly modernist, it exhibits modernist traits. Machado’s modernism is intimate, eschewing bombast, sensory excess, exoticism, and escapism for feeling, simplicity, and seasonality.
Themes
- Time: An obsessive theme, viewed as an inevitable path to death, with nostalgic flashbacks to the past (childhood). Symbols include the afternoon (sadness), the road (life’s flow towards death), water (life’s movement), the wheel (existential monotony), and the sea (death).
- Death: Sometimes feared, sometimes desired, often personified as a beautiful woman.
- God: Machado lacks faith in God or an afterlife but searches for meaning.
Campos de Castilla (1912): Shifts from subjectivism to depict the landscape and people of Castile. Themes include the landscape (realistic and symbolic), Spain (past, present, future, with critical views), and philosophical/existential concerns.
Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)
Born in Moguer (Huelva), Jiménez suffered from depression due to his hyperesthesia. He married Zenobia Camprubí in 1916, and a trip to New York transformed his poetry. He left Spain during the Civil War, settling in Puerto Rico, and won the Nobel Prize in 1956. For him, life and work were inseparable, and poetry was a vital necessity.
Work Periods
Sensitive Period
Influenced by Spanish American Modernism, French Symbolism, and Bécquer. Works include Arias tristes, Jardines lejanos, Elejías puras, Elejías intermedias, Elejías lamentables, and Platero y yo. Common features are landscape descriptions symbolizing the poet’s soul (autumnal parks, gardens), a tone of sadness, melancholy, loneliness, nostalgia, and death as a predominant theme (fear, omens, descriptions of death, sobbing, sighs). Childhood and Moguer are evoked as a lost paradise.
Intellectual Period
This modernist period ends in 1916 with Diario de un poeta recién casado. The new poetry reacts against the previous stage, stripping away ornamentation to focus on the essential. The Diario is a sensory journal with concise annotations from his American trip (sea, sky, ports), emphasizing experience over appearance. Free verse, prose, and blank verse appear. Subsequent books show a tendency towards abstraction (eternity, stone, sky), conceptual poetry, and finding “the exact name of things.” Key themes are the city (life, loneliness, eternity), longing for eternity, identification with beauty (a way to achieve eternity), and death (not as something terrible, but as a transition to the eternal).
“Sufficient” or “True” Period
This third period includes his writings in America, continuing the previous phase but with more mystical and hermetic poems.