THE BACKGROUND

In 1909, the Modernist poet Leopoldo Lugones published a volume of poems called Lunario sentimental [Sentimental Lunarium] in which he used free verse (still rare in Spanish), parody, comic metaphor and contemporary references to trams and policemen. The now tired Modernist idiom was abandoned, to be replaced by startling images and grotesque descriptions like the following lines on a chorus of cats:

‘Yesca’ is tinder which strikes a spark and starts a fire in the same way that the cat's claws can suddenly spark and become deadly weapons. The image is unusual, accurate and slightly comic. In the preface to this collection, Lugones had stressed the importance of investing these new images:

While Lugones anticipates in these lines many of the theories of the avant-garde of the '20s, he was by no means an isolated experimenter. Even before 1920, poets were relatively unaffected by the didacticism and the realism of the novel. Under the influence of the French symbolists, they began to reject the view that poetry was a direct expression of feeling and to write poems that were like artefacts.