While America was reveling in the Roaring ’20s, Spain was similarly enjoying “Felices Veinte,” a time of prosperity, exuberance, and social advancement for women.
It was an era full of trends more commonly associated with the 21st century than nearly 100 years ago: wild music, provocative dances, celebrity worship, sports mania, fascination with new technologies, and social change. The era also brought the advent of Spanish vanguard poetry, which blossomed after World War I.
The times and poetry combined to produce a rich cultural milieu that serves as the focus of Catherine Bellver’s recent book, Bodies in Motion: Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics.
Bellver examines the avant-garde poets of this era, often referred to as the “Generation of 1927,” who employed recurring motifs that included dance, sports, and technological change in their experimental poetry.
But Bellver’s work goes beyond the analysis of vanguard poetics. It also provides insight into the context in which the poetry was written – an exciting time in Spain when the literary set collided with the nightclub crowd, when athletes and entertainers achieved cult status, and when women emerged as an intellectual force.
“Some of the phenomena that we take for granted today had their origins in the socio-cultural developments of the ’20s,” says Bellver. “The seeds of today’s trends were planted then.”
She notes that in the poetry of both male and female vanguardists, dance, sports, and machines were emblematic of the liberation the era promised and the dynamism it exuded.
The poets she covers in her book include Rafael Alberti, Carmen Conde, Guillermo de Torre, Josefina de Torre, Gerardo Diego, Concha Méndez, Ernestina de Champourcin, Jorge Guillén, José María Hinojosa, Federico García Lorca, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, and Pedro Salinas.
Their works displayed a newfound sense of play, liberation, and energy, Bellver says. Perhaps jazz inspired, vanguard poetry took on new rhythms. Influenced by other modern European writers and artists, the poets employed experimental word play and tried new visual forms.
Bellver finds vivid examples in the poets’ words that weave together the strands of music, dance, sports, and motion that together depict the era’s energy.
For example, Concha Méndez describes swimmers’ “beaming torsos/ jumping waves/in lyrical dances/and acrobatics.”
Bellver also discusses the contrasts between male and female vanguard poetry, noting both genders chose some similar subjects and imagery but conveyed very different messages. On the subject of dance, for instance, the men’s poetry was more experimental rhythmically and visually, but its voice was that of spectator rather than participant: Luis Mosquera wrote of men watching women “abandoned to the movement/ and under their tight, short dresses/ their hips seem to swell.” Ernestina de Champourcin, on the other hand, wrote of being part of the dance herself, “Free of voice and gestures, I am far from everything./ I am I, on my shores.”
To capture the essence of the poetry and the times, Bellver traveled to Spain and embarked on some literary detective work, much of it without the aid of online sources. She visited the poets’ old gathering places at universities and former music halls. She combed libraries the old-fashioned way – rummaging through the stacks, seeking out unpublished materials, finding tantalizing scraps of notes and letters, then contacting the agents and heirs of the poets for permission to copy what she had found.
“Gathering all the rights and permissions myself was a daunting task,” says Bellver.
Once she had amassed a vast amount of material, her careful assembly began; it took her nine years to complete the book. The footnotes alone, 24 pages of them, are a scholarly tour de force, revealing her mastery of the history, society, language, and art of the times.
Bellver began the book after being named a UNLV distinguished professor, the highest honor bestowed on a faculty member. The designation is awarded to only a select few – those who have demonstrated extraordinary qualities both as teachers and scholars while achieving national and international recognition. Instead of resting on her considerable laurels, Bellver ramped up her research, expanding and combining it with her feminist studies. The result was two books: Absence and Presence: Spanish Women Poets of the Twenties and Thirties, published in 2001, and more recently Bodies in Motion.
“The latter is the culmination of my academic interests,” she says. “It’s a natural evolution of my critical and textual background, my fascination with historical and cultural contexts, and my literary feminist studies. I then went back to the study of poetry, where I began my academic career. I feel like I’ve come full circle.”
So, it seems, has society. Her book demonstrates how trends from an era long past portended today’s mass media culture. In this way, Bodies in Motion offers a larger, more expansive view of poetry of the era, including perspective on history and social change.
Bellver is currently pursuing specific studies on several poets discussed in the book.
