Spanish Literary Modernism: A Deep Dive
Spanish Literary Modernism
NEW: Hispano-American literary movement born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and spread to Spain by Ruben Dario following the publication of *Profane Prose* (1896). Its splendor was short and can be considered exhausted by 1915, but its importance was crucial to the evolution of Spanish poetry, as it meant a total renewal. Poetic modernism was a movement, although novels, short stories, and drama were also growing.
Modern Revolution
The poetry of Ruben Dario (language poems of worship, yokes of rhythm and feeling, trying to find worlds and fantastic beings) and his attitude to life had consequences for Spanish poetry:
- With modernism, foreign literary movements became available in Spain: Parnassianism and French symbolism and the work of British and Italians. R. Dario had succeeded in making a synthesis of these influences and romantic poetry.
- Parnassianism was characterized by the slogan “art for art’s sake” (cult of formal perfection). Symbolism, by a vision of the world as a network of symbols, secrets, and hidden realities that the poet must discover and display.
- Literature acquires an aristocratic air and is devoted to the exaltation of delicacy and beauty. That is shown in the issues, in the care of the form, and the deployment of sensorial elements in which the history or circumstances of the poem become. Social problems often have no place in these poems.
- The writer adopts a lifestyle consistent with his conception of art, excluding the dedication to bohemia. His rigged literary contempt of the bourgeois sense of the world is the life of coffees, gatherings, his haughtiness is night. But the artist almost always contrasted with their material misery. Thus his poems become the imaginative compensation, extremely rich, for extreme poverty.
Features
- The creator feels discomfort with society, is inclined to solitude, and moves away from everyday reality.
- Writing maintains its anti-bourgeois, anti-vulgar, and anti-realist position, trying for an elegant, exotic, and cosmopolitan art.
- Their external environments are classical antiquity, the medieval and legendary world, and the space and environment of the Eastern inner world of Paris, showing nostalgia and restlessness.
- The creator maintains the cult of beauty through the formal idealization of reality.
Themes
Identify two main lines, both with traces of Romanticism:
- Escapist Line: Addresses issues of the past or exotic; the poet seeks to represent rare worlds and exotic places with no geographical limit: ancient Japan, Chile, Paris, and Greece have a place in the poem if something allows for a beautiful setting. Eroticism and love are frequent, a snapshot of the rebellious and anti-bourgeois spirit.
- Intimate Line: The link to the expression of the poet’s intimacy. It shows discomfort with the world that surrounds him. Love and the world are viewed with melancholic, unrealizable eyes. A desire for countries shown in autumn or depopulated, a clear romantic root.
Style and Metrics
Modern poets use language that offers all possibilities to achieve beauty:
- Color: Fundamental. Chromatic adjectives run through all the branches (red pageboy).
- Musicality of the verse: Accommodates very marked rhythms to the themes. A procession or parade = warrior exploits. Soft melodies = delicate emotions, the sadness of a prince.
- Very rich lexicon (Neologisms, unusual voices, cultism) to create sonority. Alliteration abounds, and audacious images and synesthesias. The musical sense is given by the ability to use the metric.
Modernist Poets
Ruben Dario, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Manuel Machado.
Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958)
Born in Moguer (Huelva). Early poetic vocation, modernist impeller, great restorer of our contemporary poetry. Nobel Prize winner, died in 1956 in Puerto Rico.
Incessantly seeking beauty. He evolved from Modernism to a very personal work. He introduced a new conception of poetry that is governed by intelligence, always targeting the minority.
Greatest influence on 20th-century poets. Stages:
- Sensitive (beauty): inspired by modernism. “Sad wings sound of loneliness”
- Intellectual (knowledge): “Diary of a Newly Married Poet”, path to pure poetry
- Enough (eternity): the aspiration to the absolute, “total station”