Before the mid-century

Why begin a book about modern Spanish American poetry using the mid-twentieth 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”. Other critics (cf. Salvador, 1993, 262) agree. We can now see that the clearest illustration of this concern is to be found in the Poemas y antipoemas (1954) of Nicanor parra. 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. 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. 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. What this compels us to keep in mind is that the major poetry of Spanish America in the second half of the twentieth century, in its various forms, has to be seen, not just in the context of on-going innovation, but also in terms of an equally on-going crisis of ideals and beliefs which links it very intimately to the past.