The period 1868 to 1936 was witness to a political and social struggle between left and right and the inability of politicians to create a viable democratic system which would respond to the demands of all the people and the diverse regions of Spain. The history of the poetic developments in the same period is also one of a confrontation between a traditionalist and Catholic outlook and one that is progressive, impatient of aesthetic strictures, profoundly skeptical, and élitist. The former seeks a consensus from above, the second is subversive of the consensus and offers its own intellectual aesthetic agenda from the margins. The first is undynamic, reactionary, resistant to change. The second is dissident, deconstructive of the status quo and anxious for new aesthetic goals, profoundly transgressive in its engagement with the taboos of Catholic Restoration society: cultural diversity, individuality, sexuality and sensuality, nonrational states of mind, aesthetic subversion and inversion. The contrast is a striking one manifest in two statements.