Afterword

Summary

This book has attempted to address the question of why the most ambitious and intellectually challenging poetry of our time meets with so much resistance or indifference. Posed in this way, however, the question virtually answers itself: avant-garde and late modernist poetry, almost by definition, resist an easy assimilation by the larger culture. As I have shown in the preceding chapters, recent Spanish poetry outside of the “dominant school” is not lacking in quality, variety, or depth. The poetry of Valente and Gamoneda remains a paragon of High Modernist literary values. Rossetti, García, and Velasco continue to write a kind of late-modernist or avant-garde poetry that challenges the reader. I believe subsequent literary histories will recognize that it is this poetry, not the neo-conservative “poetry of experience,” that “dominates” Spanish poetry in the final two decades of the century. The twilight of the avant-garde is a triumphant one.

It should also be pointed out that such poetry, the heritage of the great moderns of the first half of the twentieth century, has never enjoyed widespread popular appeal, even at its moment of greatest cultural prestige. Thus the notion that we are living in an age especially recalcitrant to poetry is at best an historically inaccurate simplification. What has changed, perhaps, is that university professors, and others belonging to the” élite” culture, no longer profess to believe in the modernist paradigm of a “high” culture worthy of respect and emulation.