A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925): “The Country Where Poetry Flourishes: USA” (Revista de Occidente, 1925), by Enrique Díez-Canedo

Introduction

By uncovering and recovering the many international and cross-linguistic links of modernist periodicals, scholars in recent years have productively charted the global emergence of literary movements that these media enabled. Periodicals functioned as multidirectional circuits of literary exchange: the Little Review, for instance, not only published Chinese poetry in translation, but also circulated American poetry in new locales, including those that had historically resisted it. We know a good deal now about non-Anglophone writers who published in American modernist reviews; we know less, however, about the foreign interpretation and integration of these reviews and their contents. Poetry, that is, actually worked to create “great audiences” both in the United States and beyond, helping to constitute “American literature” in distant communities. Periodicals transformed both domestic and foreign audiences that were traditionally divided by language or history, functioning as capacious, portable media with translatable contents and form.¹ The artifact translated here—a document in the history of transnational periodical circulation—offers a snapshot of what Poetry, the Little Review, and a number of other American periodicals looked like in 1925 to Enrique Díez-Canedo (1879–1944), a dynamic Spanish poet, translator, journalist, critic, and founder of little magazines. In turn, this foreign critic offers contemporary scholars an invitation to investigate some of the forgotten names, places, and media of American modernist poetry that garnered attention in Spain, a country long thought to have been unconnected to this movement.

An important figure in early twentieth-century Spanish letters, Díez-Canedo was close to most every major writer in the country. He collaborated with the leading poet Juan Ramón Jiménez in 1921 to found Índice (Sign, literally “Index”), a short-lived but influential avant-garde magazine in Madrid. A translator of figures ranging from Whitman to Verlaine, H. G. Wells to Heinrich Heine, Díez-Canedo spent decades working to connect the Spanish literature of his moment—which he saw as excessively provincial and averse to foreign influences—with that of other countries. In this brief essay, he gives his compatriots an idea of what is happening in magazines across the Atlantic and attempts to account for why it should matter to them. His aim is to give an etiology of American poetry since Whitman, especially as it has flourished in modernist periodicals, into an as-yet unnamed “movement.” His survey is not simply a taxonomy or celebration of the United States’ great poets; rather, he is sometimes critical, skeptical, and sarcastic, flippant and whimsical at other moments. He looks beyond the familiar sites of modernist production such as New York City and Chicago and finds a wealth of new writing in such places as Baltimore. And he does so ambivalently, attempting to condemn some poets while announcing others as the heirs to Whitman’s legacy. Cover designs, prize competitions, fee-based poetry advice services—everything in the economy of periodicals and poetry, their production and reception, comes under scrutiny.

The contexts of Díez-Canedo’s essay are key: he published this article in the Revista de Occidente (Review of the West, Madrid, 1923–36), the most influential Hispanophone periodical of the interwar era.² It was founded and edited by José Ortega y Gasset, the country’s most prominent intellectual and a profoundly pro-European philosopher. The journal was generally conservative and spoke to a cosmopolitan cultural elite. At the time, such readers were rarely interested in American literature; furthermore, Spain’s loss in its war with the United States in 1898 ingrained an image of Americans as uncultured, crass, and belligerent. Even the letters of Spain’s former republics in Latin America had not yet found great respect or institutionalization, and many writers resisted the arrival of Spanish American modernismo in Spain in the early 1900s. Nevertheless, in the following years, thanks to this essay and the translations by Ortega’s collaborator Antonio Marichalar, American modernism was a vital part of the blossoming...