Historia poética de Nueva York en la España contemporánea by Julio Neira (review)

While Parisian aesthetic trends – not to mention, in some cases, the city of Paris itself as lived experience – leave an indelible imprint on the verse of the modernista movement in the early twentieth century, over subsequent decades it is the metropolis of New York which comes to eclipse the City of Light as a privileged urban topos and source of artistic inspiration among many contemporary Spanish poets. Such is the root premise of Julio Neira’s panoramic Historia poética de Nueva York en la España Contemporánea (Cátedra, 2012), a study which, to quote the author’s own apt description in the introductory chapter, presents “un censo, si no definitivo sí lo más completo posible, de los textos poéticos que tratan de la ciudad de Nueva York, o de alguno de los aspectos relacionados a ella, escritos por poetas españoles” (22). Indeed, the book refers with varying degrees of analytical detail to the work of some two hundred Spanish poets, both canonical and otherwise, and its featured textual selections – following through on the author’s promise of completeness – liberally run the gamut from poems presented with a tone of editorial approbation to others which, though topically relevant, stand assigned more dubious appraisals vis-à-vis their literary merit.

While Neira organizes his study diachronically, carefully tracing, for starters, certain early twentieth-century motions in this migration from Paris to New York to the influence of two major Latin American poets, José Martí and Rubén Darío, on Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorca, the monograph is also internally (but less overtly) structured around a series of perspectives and themes which contemporary Spanish poets concerned with New York have revisited time and again with a kind of unrelenting dependability over more or less a hundred years. Whether working from a space of exile, in travel writing, or from within the borders of Spain itself, the stylistically and ideologically diverse Peninsular poets whom Neira showcases reveal a gravitation to New York by way of what the author sees as “[una] trayectoria espiral en la que algunos subtemas, perspectivas o motivos se repiten, a veces de forma consciente y como homenaje,” or even “de manera involuntaria y fortuita” (148). Amidst the rings of this spiral, one finds, for example, various reiterations of the anti-capitalist critique of the modern city (following, belatedly, the spirit of Baudelaire), more occasional instances of a kind of Whitmanesque euphoria before the ideal of the democratic metropolis, a keen fascination with New York as it exists in the cinematic imaginary, awe and consternation before the imposing geometry of the city’s architecture, social anxieties with respect to racial inequality, celebrations of New York’s contributions to jazz and art, and frequent homage to both the lyrical content and historical backstory of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York: a touchstone text whose relevance never falls far into the background of Neira’s study.

After an introductory chapter whose argument focuses on how urban concerns evolve in Spanish poetry as it negotiates twentieth-century modernity, Neira makes of use of the book’s first chapter to underscore the key role of the aforementioned Martí-Darío-Jiménez-García Lorca genealogy in bringing the particular theme of New York toward the fore of the genre. The same chapter outlines, with broad brush strokes, the growing visibility of American culture in the post-World War I period, specifically highlighting the impact of jazz on Spanish poets, as well as the importance of increased cultural contact between U.S. and Peninsular writers, artists, and thinkers (mainly as fostered by institutions such as Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes and a number of American universities). Neira’s second chapter hones in on the poetics of exile, closely examining the circumstances (both in fact and in poetic fiction) of several poets’ post-Civil War relocation...