Modernist and 98 Generation Poetry: Features and Trends
The Poetry of Modernism
The poetry of Modernism is an aesthetic renovation of poetic language. It incorporates features from French poetry. Parnassianism emphasizes art for art’s sake, a taste for refined and formal perfection. Symbolism embraces the love of music and the incorporation of symbols, including synesthesia. These sensorial images, introduced by Rubén Darío, are characterized by the pursuit of absolute beauty to escape from everyday reality.
Key Features of Modernist Poetry
- The poet feels discomfort in society and is inclined to solitude, exploring intimacy and distancing themselves from everyday reality.
- The poetry has an anti-bourgeois, anti-realist, and anti-vulgar stance. It strives for an aristocratic art that is elegant, cosmopolitan, and exotic.
- External environments include classical antiquity, the legendary medieval world, Eastern spaces, and Parisian settings.
- Worship of formal beauty through the idealization of reality.
Topics, Attitudes, and Trends
Topics range from classical to modern, from medieval romance. Attitudes include a symbolist vision and interpretation of reality. Poetic trends involve colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile impressions that permeate the evocation of landscape, people, animals, and things through extreme stylization and idealization. Gray tones and intimate feelings, moods, and individual visions of the world are also present.
The inclination of the authors depends on their personal conditions and ways of being. While Rubén Darío leans towards external sensuality, Antonio Machado explores more privately, coloring the landscape, and Juan Ramón Jiménez alternates equally between both trends.
Language and Metric
Language is lush and open to all types of expression, approaching the ideal of literary beauty. Rhetorical resources are Baroque and contemporary European trends, and the vocabulary is cultured and recovered from the past.
Metric finds aesthetic inquiry in the goal of rhythm and musicality. Meters rescue forgotten forms or seek changes, using or experiencing unusual lines and changing traditional verses.
The Poetry of the Generation of ’98
The poetry of the Generation of ’98 shares common features such as a progressive ideology and concern for the state of political and social crisis in Spain.
Characteristics of the Generation of ’98
- Analytical thinking and a self-absorbed view of Spain and Castile.
- A vision focused on the authentically Spanish, through landscape, history, and literature.
- Idealistic solutions proposed to regenerate the country.
- A mixture of romantic and subjective attitudes with existentialism.
- Examination of conscience following the colonial disaster of 1898.
Linguistic Features
- Rejection of baroque style and rhetoric.
- A trend towards natural language that is precise and clear.
- Recovery of localisms and archaisms.
- Impressionistic descriptive techniques.
- Idealization of nature and the Castilian landscape.
Nineteenth-Century Avant-Garde Poetry
Nineteenth-century avant-garde poetry. Essayists (José Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón) and novelists (Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Gabriel Miró) emerged around 1914. They were close to the modernism of their vital, social, and aesthetic concerns but differed in their refined literary expression.
Key Aspects of Avant-Garde Poetry
- Adoption of an intellectual and minority attitude in their concern for the regeneration of Spain.
- Defense of pure art and literature as an exercise in language.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s work is characterized by disagreement and dissent, and a tendency towards experimentation and the indeterminacy of gender. He was a great promoter of the avant-garde spirit in Spain and invented Greguerías.