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| Ultraismo | |
|---|---|
| Name | Ultraismo |
| Years active | 1918–1925 |
| Country | Spain; Argentina |
Ultraismo was a literary movement emerging in the early 20th century that sought to renew poetic language and oppose established traditions in Spain and Argentina. It advocated for brevity, metaphorical intensity, and rejection of ornate rhetoric, positioning itself amid debates involving avant-garde groups across Europe and Latin America. Ultraismo intersected with contemporary currents in literature, publishing, and cultural institutions, shaping modernist trajectories in Spanish-language letters.
Ultraismo developed in the wake of World War I and during a period marked by debates in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Seville about artistic renewal. The movement reacted against the models of Modernismo associated with figures such as Rubén Darío, aligning instead with innovations from Paris and the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. Key early forums included literary magazines and salons influenced by editors and writers connected to Revista de Occidente, Grecia, and Pluma y Lápiz. Political and cultural institutions such as the Real Academia Española and publishing houses in Madrid and Buenos Aires created a counterpoint to the movement’s insurgent aesthetics. Transatlantic networks linked émigré intellectuals, expatriate writers, and avant-garde journals in Paris, London, and Montevideo.
Ultraismo championed compression, vivid imagery, and syntactic daring, borrowing techniques from Futurism, Dada, Cubism, and Surrealism. Its manifestos and critical statements reacted against established figures like Antonio Machado and Leopoldo Lugones, promoting instead the use of striking metaphors and free verse in the spirit of T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman’s formal experiments. Printers and typographers associated with Editorial Losada and design workshops in Barcelona and Madrid contributed to visual layouts emphasizing typography, collage, and visuality influenced by Theo van Doesburg and Wassily Kandinsky. Poetic technique favored the juxtaposition of images found in the work of Hugo Ball, Paul Éluard, and Max Jacob, while musicality and cadence drew upon innovations from composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie in contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations.
Principal practitioners included poets and critics linked to journals and publishing houses in Madrid and Buenos Aires. Among notable writers associated with the movement were Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Güiraldes, Guillermo de Torre, César Moro, Enrique González Tuñón, Eduardo Mallea, and Samuel Glusberg. Important periodicals that disseminated Ultraist ideas included Proa, Martín Fierro, La Gaceta Literaria, and España y América; editors such as Vicente Huidobro and Manuel Maples Arce engaged in parallel debates. Collections and anthologies published by houses like Editorial Losada, La Calle, and Renacimiento brought together works by contributors from Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza, and Montevideo. Conferences and readings at venues such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes and university salons in Buenos Aires and Madrid helped circulate manifestos and critical essays authored by participants and translators working between Spanish and French.
Reception of Ultraismo varied across literary circles and critical establishments, eliciting praise from reformers and skepticism from institutional critics linked to Real Academia Española and conservative newspapers in Madrid and Buenos Aires. The movement influenced younger generations, leaving traces in the practices of poets and critics who later engaged with Surrealism and Negritude debates in transatlantic forums. Reviewers in Revista de Occidente, La Nación, and El País debated Ultraist tenets alongside contemporaneous manifestos by André Breton and polemics involving José Ortega y Gasset and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Internationally, correspondences between Ultraist writers and figures in Paris and New York fostered exchanges with editors at Scribner's Magazine and contributors to Poetry (magazine).
Ultraismo’s emphasis on metaphorical compression and visual experimentation prefigured and intersected with Surrealism, Concrete Poetry, and later avant-garde movements in Latin America and Iberia. Its practitioners maintained links with practitioners of Creacionismo and experimental prose associated with Vicente Huidobro and echoed in the work of later novelists and poets such as Octavio Paz, Alejo Carpentier, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz’s contemporaries in diplomatic and academic circles. Institutional histories in archives at libraries and museums in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago (Chile), and Mexico City preserve correspondence, drafts, and periodicals documenting the movement’s trajectories. Scholarly treatments in university departments at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and research centers in Paris and New York University continue to reassess Ultraismo’s role in 20th-century Spanish-language modernism.
Category:Literary movements