Ultraist movement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ultraist movement (in Spanish, ultraísmo) was a literary movement, born in Spain in 1918, with the declared intention of opposing modernism, which had dominated Spanish poetry since the end of the 19th century.
The movement was launched in the tertulias of Madrid's Café Colonial, presided by Rafael Cansinos-Assens. The Ultraist core was formed, among others, by Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, who lived in Madrid at the time.
In the trend of Russian and Italian futurism, Dadaism and French surrealism, the Ultraist movement, which would die off in 1922 with the disappearance of Ultra magazine, proposed an aesthetic change that was less ambitious than that of surrealism (which intended to spread to all arts and even to everyday life). Ultraists denounced the mannerism and the opulence of modernismo, a movement initiated by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Ultraist poetry summoned forth strong, sometimes shocking images, with references to the modern world and the new technologies; it also employed evocative images, influenced by Symbolism and by the Parnassians. Ultraism forsook rhyme in exchange for nonconformist metrics and free verse, and adopted a free typographic layout of the poem in the page, attempting to fuse the plastic arts and poetry.
In an article published by Nosotros magazine (Buenos Aires, 1922), Borges summarized Ultraist goals thus:
- Reduction of the lyric element to its primordial element, metaphor
- Deletion of useless middle sentences, linking particles and adjectives.
- Avoidance of ornamental artifacts, confessionalism, circumstantiation, preaching and farfetched nebulosity.
- Synthesis of two or more images into one, thus widening its suggestiveness.
The expression "ornamental artifacts" was clearly a reference to Rubén Darío's modernism, which the Ultraists considered over-ornamented and lacking in substance. The Ultraist movement agreed with other avant-garde movements in its elimination of sentimentalism.
Ultraism was akin to the creacionismo of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, who met with the Ultraists in their tertulias. Huidobro proposed that a poem should always be a new object, distinct from the rest, which must be created "like nature creates a tree" — a position that implied freedom of the poem from reality, including the inner reality of the author.
