Abstract
The Modernist movement in Spanish- American poetry was
not an isolated phenomenon but had its counterpart in France,
Italy and Spain as well as in Germany, England and the
United States. It developed when the Romantic movement began
to lose its force and ceased to satisfy the aesthetic aspirations
of the more ardent poetic spirits of the latter half
of the nineteenth century.
In Spanish- American countries this development was less
pronounced than elsewhere, for there Romanticism never took
a great hold. It has been pointed out by Menéndez y Pelayo
that in so far as Romanticism was the expression of the
individualistic revolt against the rigidity of the classical
school, it could be, and was transplanted to America, though
in the majority of writers it was the worst extravagances of
their models,(Byron, Hugo, Espronceda, and Zorrilla) that
were most successfully imitated. To the other element in
European Romanticism, that based on historic lore and traditions
that had come down from medieval times, there was nothing
corresponding in America, inasmuch as the traditions of
the modern Mexican or Peruvian, for example, were European
and had no living roots in the history or legends of the
vanished Aztecs or Incas. Moreover, there were in America
none of the Gothic cathedrals and feudal castles that served
as inspiration for romantic dreams in Europe; and hence
there could not possibly exist that mysterious interpenetration
of landscape and history which forms one of the greatest
charms of Romantic poetry in Europe.
