Until a few years ago, to speak of modernismo meant to speak primarily about modernista poetry. I have explained elsewhere in this book why this is no longer the case, and how the renewed appreciation of modernista prose has allowed for a better understanding of the far-reaching significance of the modernista movement in Spanish American culture. Nevertheless, it is true that, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth, poetry still took pride of place among the literary arts, despite the evident achievements of the novel. The modernistas still worked in an environment in which the practice of poetry was regarded as the quintessence of literature, and in which all writers were expected to write verse at some point in their careers as a way of showing their literary credentials. Poetry was thus the genre on which a great many modernistas (though not all, as we have seen) focused their creative energies. Despite the fact that prose writing may have taken much more of their time (and provided them, through journalism, with a fixed income), it was in poetry that many modernistas made a greater personal investment and staked their hopes for literary immortality. If prose was the medium in which the modernistas conversed with each other and with their readers about their common aesthetic, political, and cultural concerns, poetry was conceived as the site of a symbolic struggle, an artistic contest or tournament, in which poets vied with each other to achieve poetic perfection and the myriad rewards bestowed by a society that still valued poetry above all other forms of literary expression.

One of the commonplaces of the early criticism on modernista poetry was that the modernistas were merely gifted imitators of their European (particularly, French) precursors. Today, a more sophisticated understanding of the creative aspects of translation allows us to recognize that the modernistas were not sedulously copying their French models, but were in fact re-creating and selectively assimilating into the Spanishlanguage tradition those elements of the French tradition the modernistas found most suitable for their modernizing purposes.