Spanish Poetry from the 1970s to Today

Spanish Poetry: Late 1970s Trends and Style

On the multiplicity of the final years of the 70s, continuing trends among critics highlight:

• The avant-garde and surrealism trends;
• The trend towards neo-modernism;
• Culturalism;
• Classicism;
• Another trend is the baroque, exemplified by Antonio Carvajal.

With these new trends in poetry, there is a shift towards a poetry that gives entry to privacy and maintains the theme of emotion. Urban and everyday life themes are maintained, becoming a source of autobiographical content. The tone of the poems uses colloquial language, is loaded with a lexicon of modern life, and allows for an ironic distancing from reality. Free verse is still used, as is a return to classical metrical forms.

The Eighties and Nineties: Poetry of Experience

The trend that seems to have the most impact is the so-called Poetry of Experience. The poetry of experience describes what happens and where it happens. Topics range from daily events and urban reality to the deepest concern for intimacy, reflection on time and its influence on people and things, and contemplation of life itself. It is marked by mood and emotional content.

These poets reflect on life using a certain distance through procedures such as irony, replacing the first person with the second or third, and the presence of a character remote from the poet in space and time who has the experience, which has been called the "dramatic monologue".

Common Features of the Poetry of Experience:

• Rejection of many characteristics of the poetry of the "Novísimos".
• Recognition of poets from the Generation of 50.
• Understanding poetry as a genre using fictional language.
• Narrative poets, sporadically brilliant but always simple, precise, and purposeful.
• Interest in promoting the intelligibility of the text.
• Largely urban themes.

Leading Poets of the Grenadian Experience:

• Javier Egea
• Álvaro Salvador
• Luis García Montero

Other Poetic Currents in the 80s and 90s

The observation of reality takes on elegiac tones, leading to the evocation of youth and mourning the passing of time, seen in poets like José Gutiérrez.

In other cases, contemporary reality raises the evocation of collective memory, sometimes with epic neosurrealism. The neosurrealist approach received a significant boost from Blanca Andreu, notably with A girl from the provinces who came to live in a Chagall.

Other poets choose an impressionistic view, where scenes and suggestive atmospheres involve certain sentimental tones, such as Andrés Trapiello in With the Easy Life.

Women Poets Emerge in the 1980s

Importantly, the eighties saw significant inroads by women in poetry. The anthology The White Goddess, compiled by Ramón Buenaventura, was dedicated exclusively to women poets.