When Parra writes that “El poeta anda buscando la casa para el hombre actual, que está a la intemperie” (quoted in Morales, 1972, 213), he is saying nothing new. Here Parra’s outlook connects directly with that of a long line of earlier poets going back to the darker side of Romanticism and to the “Devil World” hypothesis. But as we examine this collection we notice that, while it is highly innovative in terms of its approach to poetry, its diction and even some of its themes, in one important respect it is not original at all – that is, in its despairing view of the human condition.
We can now see that the clearest illustration of this concern is to be found in the Poemas y antipoemas (1954) of Nicanor Parra. Preliminaries: The Vanguard and After Before the mid-century Why begin a book about modern Spanish American poetry using the midtwentieth century as the point of departure? Because, as William Rowe has pointed out (Rowe, 2000, 17), Vanguardism as a movement had largely run out of steam by the 1940s and “In the poets who began to write in the 1950s, there is a concern with new starting points”. This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, WiltshireĬONTENTS 1 Preliminaries: The Vanguard and After 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2008 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–85566–157–8 Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Donald L. Hart Editorial Board Alan Deyermond Julian Weiss Charles Davis Shaw is Brown Forman Professor of Spanish American Literature at the University of Virginia.įounding Editor J. At the same time there is analysis of the evolving outlook on poetry of the writers in question, both in regard to its possible social role and in regard to diction. These vary from outright scepticism to the ideological, the religious or those derived from some degree of confidence in the creative imagination as cognitive. The author emphasises the persistence of a generally negative view of the human condition and the poets' exploration of different ways of responding to it.
The aim is to establish a few paths through the largely unmapped jungle of Spanish American poetry in the time period. Consideration is then given to the decisive impact of Parra and the rise of colloquial poetry, politico-social poetry and representative figures such as Orozco, Pacheco and Cisneros. Providing a basis for understanding the main lines of development of poetry in Spanish America after Vanguardism, this volume begins with an overview of the situation at the mid-century: the later work of Neruda and Borges, the emergence of Paz. Spanish American Poetry after 1950 beyond the vanguard Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 251