Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little
attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents
the first English-language history published in the United States to
examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the
first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to
trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding
the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in
traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed
discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and
compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary
Spanish verse is rooted in the modern tradition and poetics that see the
text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the
evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its
gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry
came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of
text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major
periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages,
Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for
example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation
but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new
writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential
lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern
Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers interested in
comparative literature.
