Gerardo Diego’s Heterocronismo and the Avant-Garde: Imagen and Manual de espumas

Spanish poet Gerardo Diego chafed against orthodox Creacionismo, one of the major twentieth-century avant-garde poetic movements in Spain and Latin America, as it was conceived by its Chilean leader, Vicente Huidobro. Diego argued for the loosening of Creacionismo poetry’s architectonic structures, in order that the music of lyric might sound through. In the volumes Imagen and Manual de espumas, as well as in correspondence with poet Juan Larrea, one of Spain’s prominent adherents to the Creacionismo movement, he articulates his at once avant-garde and profoundly lyric poetic. The temporal character of Diego’s musical lyric, defined by remembered fragments in rhythmic patterns and figures such as the refrain, brings memory and the subjectivity linked with remembrance back to the fore of vanguard poetry. At the same time, his use of musico-poetic figures reinforces avant-garde poetry’s architecture and serves as a reminder of poetic form’s dual function—lyric melody and harmonic structure.