Modernist Poetry and the Generation of '98 in Spain

Poetry of Modernism

Modernism is an aesthetic renovation. It is a synthesis of Parnassianism, with its taste for the refined, and Symbolism, with its taste for music, a tendency to incorporate symbols and sensory images.

In Spain, it began with Ruben Dario. It is characterized by the pursuit of beauty to escape everyday realities.

Characteristics:

• The creator is disturbed by society, is inclined to solitude and privacy, and moves away from reality.
• It has an anti-bourgeois, anti-realist stance, and tries to create an anti-vulgar, aristocratic, elegant, and exotic art.
• Favorite environments are classical antiquity, the medieval world, and the legendary.
• It has a formal cult of beauty.

Themes

Themes range widely from classical to modern and medieval romance.

Attitudes

It has a symbolic interpretation of reality.

Poetic Trend

Sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings play an important role in the evocation of people, animals, and things through extreme idealization. But it also delves into the gray tones and intimate sensitivity of the poet and their moods.

Language

The language is lush and open, like romanticism. Any kind of expression is close to ideal beauty.

Metric

It finds rhythm and musicality. Forgotten meters are rescued (Alexandrian), or variations and foreign lines are invented.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

He was a great innovator of contemporary poetry.

Poetic Evolution:

• Modernist Bright, but with shades of gray and intimate, between the wonder of nature: Arias Tristes, Elegies, La Soledad Sonora.
• Pure Poetry: Poetry is released from the sensory image, becomes timeless, a symbol, and identifies with beauty, eternity, the absolute.
• Pure poetry intensifies the path of knowledge in books written in exile: The Total Station, Animal Background, Rivers to Be.

The Generation of '98

This denomination is very controversial since its limits with Modernism are still unclear. The features common to all members are a progressive ideology and concern for the social and political state of Spain.

The work of the Generation of '98 contains two trends: the symbolic legacy of Modernism and the German ideological inheritance. But it eliminates the brilliant rhetoric of language, maintains the Impressionist character, and the idealization of nature and landscape.

Antonio Machado

He had a radical ideology and was a humanist. He went into exile at the end of the Civil War. His poetry synthesizes the classical in form, the symbolism of the sensory world, and the search for inner galleries. Themes that recur in his works are nostalgia for childhood and youth, the passage of time, and the lack of love.

Stages of Machado's Work:

• The first (Soledades) shows the poet of the interior, loneliness, and melancholy.
• The second (Campos de Castilla) is his integration into the Generation of '98 and his departure with the inconsistency and maladjustment to society, and also the sublimation of an idealized and surreal landscape.
• The third stage is more thoughtful, and thought comes to the sententious.