Culturalism and the "New" Poetry. A Poem by Pedro Gimferrer: "Cascabeles" from Arde el mar (1966)

Abstract

The study deals with the group of Spanish poets commonly called the novisimos or promocion de 1970, using as a base a poem by Pedro Gimferrer published in 1966. It studies the aesthetic break-through achieved by this generation, highlighting the concept of culturalism that critics used to define it twenty years ago. It examines the equivocal uses to which this concept can be put, and describes its correct meaning in the light of the aesthetic to which it refers. It then studies the mechanisms implicit in the writing of this non-confessional lyric poetry, centering it on two complementary procedures: the use of a historical persona that serves as an analogue (personaje historico analogico), and that of another work of art that functions as an objectifying device (obra de arte ajena objetivadora). It considers these in the light of two perspectives: the overcoming of neo-romantic rhetoric, and the participation of the reader. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol16/iss1/6 Culturalism and New Poetry. A Poem by Pedro Gimferrer: `Cascabeles' from Arde el mar (1966) Guillermo Cutler() Universidad de Alicante Translated by Frederick H. Fornoff Arde el mar (The Sea is Burning), published in 1966, is the book that inaugurates the radical change which, with respect to the immediate tradition of postwar Spanish poetry, was realized by the socalled novisimos or poets of the generation of 1970. Cascabeles (Bells) is a perfectly representative example of that rupture, of the new concept of the poetic text that it occasions, and of the first moment in the evolution of the poets to whom I refer. The change that is brought about in the second half of the decade of the sixties has the effect of disorienting readers as well as critics of poetry in Spain, because it is marked by an absolute lack of response to the expectations of both. Those expectations, as in every moment of literary history, are determined by an implicit assumption of continuity of the tendencies admitted as forming part of the prevailing literary universe or as having formed part of it in the recent past, and as having achieved, in both cases, majority acceptance. The horizon of expectations of the Spanish reader of poetry in the seventh decade of this century consisted in essence of two fundamental elements: 1) the direct use of the confessional and confidential I, which derives from the concept of language as a non-problematical means of communication for the transmission of ethical messages pertaining to the human condition, messages that allude without mediation to a necessarily shared referential space (occasionally involving ideological, religious or moral obstacles) between author and reader; and 2) a product of the same concept of language, the establishment of the text as a vehicle for the transmission of critical messages relative to the social and political environment. In this second case, the dogma of the social function of the text, which theoretically embraces the dogma of its reception by the majority,