The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry in the 1980s

ff ERHAPS the single most significant development in Spanish poetry of the most recent decade is a waning of the avant-garde impulse that has animated modern poetry from the early years of . ^ 1 ^ . the twentieth century. One anthologist charac(TiCil terizes the poetry of the 1980s as "una poesia ——» * 'moderna' que por primera vez en este siglo, no se identifica con vanguardia" (Barella 14). One symptom of the times is a changed attitude toward the literary and artistic past. The founding gesture of the avant-garde is a break with tradition. The modern artist makes use of cultural monuments by rewriting them, wrenching them from their original contexts: Duchamp paints a moustache on the Mona Lisa and provides an obscene caption. A similar attitude is evident in the last self-proclaimed avant-garde in Spanish letters, the novisimos of the late 1960s and 1970s. Questioning the artistic stultification of the immediate postwar period, these writers revindicate the poetic modernity of the prewar period. In spite of the considerable distance between the postmodernism of the 1970s and the modernism of earlier decades, the novisimos view themselves as a new manifestation of the avantgarde tradition of twentieth-century art.