Novísimos
Encyclopedia
The Novísimos were a poetic
group in Spain
who took their name from an anthology
in which the Catalan
critic José María Castellet gathered the work of the majority of the youngest and most experimental poets in the decade of the 1970s: Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (Nine Very New Spanish Poets), Barcelona
, 1970. Nevertheless, they were often referred to as the "venecianos" (Venetians), in allusion to one of the poems in the anthology, Oda a Venecia ante el mar de los teatros ("Ode to Venice in front of the theatre sea") by Pere Gimferrer.
This anthology was the birth certificate of the poetic group, and it appeared divided in two sections:
The group's characteristics are:
Their literary formation was fundamentally foreign and cosmopolitan, which meant:
The poetics
included in the anthology declare, above all, the primacy of language and style, and express an enormous scepticism in the value of poetry and in the occupation of the poet. "Poetry is useless" would be the slogan that better defines the attitude of this group in 1970.
Basically, two tendencies coexisted inside the group: the culturalist (Guillermo Carnero, José María Álvarez
, Pere Gimferrer), and the tendency connected to pop aesthetic, counterculture
or pop culture (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
, Leopoldo María Panero
).
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
group in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
who took their name from an anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
in which the Catalan
Catalan people
The Catalans or Catalonians are the people from, or with origins in, Catalonia that form a historical nationality in Spain. The inhabitants of the adjacent portion of southern France are sometimes included in this definition...
critic José María Castellet gathered the work of the majority of the youngest and most experimental poets in the decade of the 1970s: Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (Nine Very New Spanish Poets), Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, 1970. Nevertheless, they were often referred to as the "venecianos" (Venetians), in allusion to one of the poems in the anthology, Oda a Venecia ante el mar de los teatros ("Ode to Venice in front of the theatre sea") by Pere Gimferrer.
This anthology was the birth certificate of the poetic group, and it appeared divided in two sections:
- "Los Seniors" (seniors): Manuel Vázquez MontalbánManuel Vázquez MontalbánManuel Vázquez Montalbán was a prolific Spanish writer: journalist, novelist, poet, essayist, anthologue, prologist, humourist, critic, as well as a gastronome and a FC Barcelona supporter....
, Antonio Martínez SarriónAntonio Martínez SarriónAntonio Martínez Sarrión, poet and translator, born in Albacete in 1939.-Biography:Studied bachelor in Albacete and licensed in Law in the Universidad de Murcia in 1961. In 1963 he moved to Madrid, where he works as a government employee in the Central Administration...
and José María ÁlvarezJosé María ÁlvarezJosé María Álvarez, born in Cartagena, Spain on the 31st of May, 1942, is a Spanish poet and novelist.He studied Philosophy and Letters in the University of Murcia, Philosophy in the Sorbonne and subsequently both History and Geography in Spanish universities.The principal work of Álvarez is...
- "La Coqueluche" (younger talents): Félix de Azúa, Pere Gimferrer, Vicente Molina Foix, Guillermo Carnero, Ana María Moix and Leopoldo María PaneroLeopoldo María PaneroLeopoldo María Panero , is a Spanish poet, commonly placed in the Novísimos group.Panero is the archetype of a decadence as much cultivated as repudiated, but that decadence has not stopped him from being the first member of his generation in being incorporated to the classic Spanish editorial...
.
The group's characteristics are:
- Absolute formal freedom.
- Automatic writingAutomatic writingAutomatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
, and various techniques such as ellipsisEllipsisEllipsis is a series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted. An ellipsis can also be used to indicate an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence...
, syncope and collageCollageA collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
. - Introduction of exotic elements, artifices.
- Influence from the mass mediaMass mediaMass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
and cinema. - Influence from popular culturePopular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
and popular myths: music, mainstream cinema, comic strips. (A kind of literary pop influenced by the aestheticsAestheticsAesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
of Andy WarholAndy WarholAndrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
.)
Their literary formation was fundamentally foreign and cosmopolitan, which meant:
- Rejection of the immediate SpanishSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
tradition, with the exceptions of Vicente AleixandreVicente AleixandreVicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre was a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1977. He was part of the Generation of '27. He died in Madrid in 1984....
, Luis CernudaLuis CernudaLuis Cernuda , was a Spanish poet and literary critic.-Life and career:...
and Jaime Gil de BiedmaJaime Gil de BiedmaJaime Gil de Biedma y Alba was a Spanish post-Civil War poet.He was born in Nava de la Asunción on November 13, 1929. He stopped writing poetry some ten years before his death...
. - Discovery of the "damned" writers in the Spanish languageSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
: Octavio PazOctavio PazOctavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...
, José Lezama LimaJosé Lezama LimaJosé Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature....
and the BaroqueBaroqueThe Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
writers such as Francisco de QuevedoFrancisco de QuevedoFrancisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, Quevedo was one of the most prominent Spanish poets of the age. His style is characterized by what was called conceptismo...
and Luis de GóngoraLuis de GóngoraLuis de Góngora y Argote was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered to be the most prominent Spanish poets of their age. His style is characterized by what was called culteranismo, also known as Gongorism...
among many others. - Studying of the culturalists T. S. EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and Ezra PoundEzra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, of Kavafis, Saint-John PerseSaint-John PerseSaint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...
, Wallace StevensWallace StevensWallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
and the FrenchFranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
surrealists. - Restoration of Rubén DaríoRubén DaríoFélix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...
's modernism.
The poetics
Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
included in the anthology declare, above all, the primacy of language and style, and express an enormous scepticism in the value of poetry and in the occupation of the poet. "Poetry is useless" would be the slogan that better defines the attitude of this group in 1970.
Basically, two tendencies coexisted inside the group: the culturalist (Guillermo Carnero, José María Álvarez
José María Álvarez
José María Álvarez, born in Cartagena, Spain on the 31st of May, 1942, is a Spanish poet and novelist.He studied Philosophy and Letters in the University of Murcia, Philosophy in the Sorbonne and subsequently both History and Geography in Spanish universities.The principal work of Álvarez is...
, Pere Gimferrer), and the tendency connected to pop aesthetic, counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
or pop culture (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was a prolific Spanish writer: journalist, novelist, poet, essayist, anthologue, prologist, humourist, critic, as well as a gastronome and a FC Barcelona supporter....
, Leopoldo María Panero
Leopoldo María Panero
Leopoldo María Panero , is a Spanish poet, commonly placed in the Novísimos group.Panero is the archetype of a decadence as much cultivated as repudiated, but that decadence has not stopped him from being the first member of his generation in being incorporated to the classic Spanish editorial...
).