Spanish Literature: Noucentisme, Avant-Garde, and Key Authors

Characteristics of Noucentisme

• Rationalism: Noucentists defended intellectual rigor, cold and objective analysis of circumstances, and clear exposition.
• Anti-Romanticism: They rejected sentimentality and preferred balanced attitudes and a serene, intellectualized expression of emotions.
• Defense of "Pure Art": Art must merely provide aesthetic pleasure and should not be a vehicle for religious or political concerns or emotions.
• Intellectual Elitism: The writings of these authors were aimed at connoisseurs.
• Careful Style: The ideal of "well-made work" led to detailed care in the structure of works and the use of a clean and refined style.

Avant-Garde Movements

• Expressionism: Characterized by the exaggerated description of physical or psychological features. It abounds in strange characters, symbolic descriptions, caricatures, and grotesque motives.
• Futurism (1910): Art radically rejected the past and embraced the future.
• Cubism: Involved the fragmentation of reality to creatively rework drawings, the superposition of split opinions, and the arbitrary assembly of elements in a poem or story.
• Dadaism (1916): Characterized by a predisposition to the absurd, the exaltation of the illogical, a return to childlike purity, and the search for the primitive.
• Surrealism (1920s-1930s): Focused on the unconscious mind and dreams.
• Creationism (1916): Focused on the creation of new realities through art.
• Ultraism (1920): Emphasized that the poem itself, devoid of sentimentality and pathos, is a beautiful object, not external reality.

Key Essayists

• Manuel Azaña (1880-1940)
• Eugenio d'Ors (1882-1954)
• Ortega y Gasset

Key Writers

• Antonio Machado
• Rubén Darío
• Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Valle-Inclán

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)

Born in Huelva in 1881, Juan Ramón Jiménez was a prolific poet and an avid reader. In 1916, he married Zenobia Camprubí, a woman of remarkable intellectual finesse. During the 1920s, he was already considered a guide and teacher for young poets who were beginning to break into the Spanish literary world. He led a secluded social life, which led him to write increasingly intellectual works. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile, where he remained until his death in 1958.

Three Stages of Jiménez's Poetry

1. Sensitive Period (Until 1915)

   His early books show a decadent Neo-Romanticism. In the orbit of Modernism, works like Arias Tristes and Jardines Lejanos are intimate. Later books, such as Soledades, accentuate Modernist ornamentation.

2. Intellectual Period (From 1917)

   This period begins with Diario de un Poeta Recién Casado (1917), an important book that definitively breaks with Modernism in search of pure, naked poetry. It pursues ineffable expression, almost in the manner of old mystical books. Subsequent works like Eternidades, Piedra y Cielo, Poesía, and Belleza continue the process of intellectualization and abstraction. The poems are short and dense. The poet seeks to escape death by reaching a state of consciousness associated with fullness, nudity, harmony, eternity, or immensity.

3. True Period (Years of Exile)

Platero y Yo (1914)

Jiménez's most famous prose work, Platero y Yo, abounds in Modernist features and shows his desire for harmony with nature. It is characterized by delicate irony, warm feeling, a yearning for beauty, and an affable attitude towards rural life. However, the cosmic order and harmony are constantly threatened by violence, hatred, injustice, pain, and death.