Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond by Andrew P. Debicki (review)

Book Reviews185 ANDREW P. DEBICKI. Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1994. 261 p. Andrew P. Debicki, the foremost critic of twentieth-century Spanish poetry , has written a ground-breaking literary history of the evolution of poetry in Spain from 1915 to 1990. His is a history that subverts the notion of history as a succession of clearly defined chronological compartments. Rejecting the traditional approach of neat categories of generations, movements , and integrated individual productions, he offers instead a sweeping account that overlaps time periods and divides the work of particular authors among different chapters. The organizational scheme that unifies his study is the shift from modernity to postmodernity that poetry underwent in this century. Debicki is the first critic to consider at length twentiethcentury Spanish poetry within the larger context of European modernity. In doing so, he not only records the story of Spanish poetry in a fresh way, he challenges his readers to rethink their own reading of contemporary Spanish poetry. Debicki's book comprises six chapters. The first, entitled "The Apogee of Modernity in Spain," defines modernism as the desire to turn human impulse into form, a search for trEinscendence, and an attempt to covert what is time-limited into timeless presence. In his second chapter, he presents the vanguardist stance of the ultraistas as a strand of indeterminacy counterbalancing the prevailing symbolist mode, while he perceives the intrusion of personal experience and subjectivity evident in Spanish surrealism as a continuation of the symbolist aspects of modernity. The politically committed poetry that emerged shortly before the civil war represents for Debicki a detour in the evolution of modernity and in the move to a postmodern era. Debicki quickly ends his discussion of modernism in order to concentrate his attention on the period after 1940. Much of the poetry written in the first two decades after the civil war, as he points out in his third chapter, focused on poetic form or social realism and consequently postponed Spain's march toward the indeterminacy that defines postmodernism. Far from monolithic, however, the poetry written between the late 1950s and 1970s showed significant signs of change. In his fourth chapter Debicki documents the change in the very concept of poetry from a means of communication to an act of discovery. By conceiving of writing as a process of creation and re-creation and of the poet as the source of events rather than a product , the poets of this period succeeded in undermining the foundations of modernity. With the novísimos, treated in chapter 5, self-discovery gave way to more consciously artful, intertextual, and metapoetic styles. Finally in his last chapter, Debicki arrives at the decade of the 1980s, which he finds less obsessed with linguistic creativity, allusiveness, and self-reflexivity . In Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Debicki achieves a superb balance between intensity of focus and breadth of coverage. He clearly 186Rocky Mountain Review marks the trajectory of Spanish poetry from modernity to postmodernity with summaries and cross-references that serve as helpful guideposts for his readers, but he also fills his excursion through history with an extraordinary number of poets and analyses of poems. References to major as well as minor poets, to landmark journals, and important critics make the study a handbook rich in informative material while the author's insightful commentaries produce a compendium of thought-provoking interpretations. For example, Debicki convincingly argues that literature is not necessarily influenced by political events by pointing to the new poetic that preceded the end of the Franco regime and presaged the post-Franco world. Besides possessing a broad knowledge of Spanish poetry, Debicki is thoroughly versed in current critical theory and Hispanic bibliography. He skillfully incorporates a myriad number of sources in his discussion without resorting to obfuscating jargon or erudite posturing. He addresses his readers through a prose style that is cleEir, precise, and uncontrived. This latest installment in an already distinguished career of more than a half dozen books on modern Spanish poetry is a history in which chronology , ideology, and authorial personality Eire no longer the overriding forces that shape the development of poetry...