The Novísimos - translated as the "Newest Ones" - were a

poetic Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...

group in

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

who took their name from an

anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically categ ...

in which the

Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...

critic A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governmen ...

Josep Maria 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 ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

, 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 Pere Gimferrer (born 22 June 1945) is a Spanish poet, translator and novelist. He is twice winner of Spain's Premio Nacional de Poesía (National Poetry Prize). He was born in Barcelona in 1945. He writes both in Castilian and Catalan. In Castil ...

History

This anthology was the birth certificate of the poetic group, and it appeared divided in two sections: *"Los Seniors" (seniors):

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (14 June 1939–18 October 2003) was a prolific Spanish writer from Catalonia: journalist, novelist, poet, essayist, anthologue, prologist, humorist, critic and political prisoner as well as a gastronome and a FC ...

Antonio Martínez Sarrión Antonio Martínez Sarrión (1 February 1939 – 14 September 2021) was a Spanish poet and translator. Early life and education Martínez Sarrión was born in Albacete, Castilla-La Mancha. He graduated with his baccalaureate in law from the Uni ...

and José María Álvarez *"La Coqueluche" (younger talents):

Félix de Azúa Félix de Azúa Comella (Barcelona, 30 April 1944) is a Spanish professor of aesthetics and philosophy, poet, novelist, essayist and translator, member of Real Academia Española. He taught Spanish literature at the University of Oxford from 1979 ...

Vicente Molina Foix Vicente Molina Foix (born 18 October 1946) is a Spanish writer and film director. Biography Born in Elche in 1946, he studied at the Complutense University in Madrid and at the University of London. He taught Spanish literature at the Univer ...

, Guillermo Carnero,

Ana María Moix Ana María Moix (12 April 1947 – 28 February 2014) was a Spanish poet, novelist, short story writer, translator and editor. A member of the Novísimos, she was the younger sister of the writer, Terenci Moix. Moix was born in Barcelona and studie ...

and

Leopoldo María Panero Leopoldo María Panero (16 June 1948 – 5 March 2014) was a Spanish poet and member of the Novísimos group. His work is included in many works of literary history, anthologies, and academic programs across Spain. Much of his work is considered ...

. The group's characteristics are: #Absolute formal freedom. #

Automatic writing Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spiri ...

, and various techniques such as

ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...

, syncope and

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

. #Introduction of exotic elements, artifices. #Influence from the

mass media Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets. Broadcast media transmit information ...

and cinema. #Influence from

popular culture Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a ...

and popular myths: music, mainstream cinema, comic strips. (A kind of literary pop influenced by the

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

.) Their literary formation was fundamentally foreign and cosmopolitan, which meant: #Rejection of the immediate

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...

tradition, with the exceptions of

Vicente Aleixandre Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo (; 26 April 1898 – 14 December 1984) was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man ...

Luis Cernuda Luis Cernuda Bidón (September 21, 1902 – November 5, 1963) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile t ...

and

Jaime Gil de Biedma Jaime Gil de Biedma y Alba (13 November 1929 – 8 January 1990) was a Spanish post-Civil War poet. He was born in Nava de la Asunción on 13 November 1929. He stopped writing poetry some ten years before his death. He insisted that the charact ...

. #Discovery of the "damned" writers in the

Spanish language Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 millio ...

Octavio Paz Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and ...

José Lezama Lima José María Andrés Fernando Lezama Lima (December 19, 1910 – August 9, 1976) was a Cuban writer, poet and essayist. He is considered one of the most influential figures in Cuban and Latin American literature. His novel ''Paradiso'' is one of ...

and the

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

writers such as

Francisco de Quevedo Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, Knight of the Order of Santiago (; 14 September 1580 – 8 September 1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, ...

and

Luis de Góngora Luis de Góngora y Argote (born Luis de Argote y Góngora; ; 11 July 1561 – 24 May 1627) was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet and a Catholic priest. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered the most prominent ...

among many others. #Studying of the culturalists T. S. Eliot and

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

, of Kavafis,

Saint-John Perse Alexis Leger (; 31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975), better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse (; also Saint-Leger Leger), was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative ...

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) 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 an executive for an insurance compa ...

and the

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

surrealists Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

. #Restoration of

Rubén Darío Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (January 18, 1867 – February 6, 1916), known as Rubén Darío ( , ), was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-language literary movement known as ''modernismo'' (modernism) that flourished at the end of ...

modernismo ''Modernismo'' is a literary movement that took place primarily during the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century in the Spanish-speaking world, best exemplified by Rubén Darío who is also known as the father of ''Modernismo''. The ter ...

(not to be confused with

modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

). The

poetics Poetics is the theory of structure, form, and discourse within literature, and, in particular, within poetry. History The term ''poetics'' derives from the Ancient Greek ποιητικός ''poietikos'' "pertaining to poetry"; also "creative" an ...

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,

), and the tendency connected to pop aesthetic,

counterculture A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Hou ...

or pop culture (

Other uses of the term

A generation of Puerto Rican artists coming of age in the 1990s have been referred to as "Los Novísimos" after art critic Manuel Alvarez Lezama applied the moniker to them in a 1995 review. According to curator Deborah Cullen, artists of the generation born after 1964, including Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Yvelisse Jímenez, Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Freddie Mercado, Ana Rosa Rivera Merrero, Fernando Paes, José Jorge Román, Carlos Rivera Villafañe, Eric Hayden French Circuns and Aaron Salabarrías Valle, as well as the US and Cuban born duo,

Allora & Calzadilla Jennifer Allora (born 20 March 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 10 January 1971) are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They were the United States Representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale, ...

, continued "working in experimental, site-specific and nontraditional modes begun in earlier generations, by artists such as Rafael Ferrer and Rafael Montañez Ortiz, and then

Antonio Martorell Antonio ("Toño") Martorell Cardona (born 18 April 1939) is a Puerto Rican painter, graphic artist and writer. He regularly exhibits in Puerto Rico and the United States and participates in arts events around the world. He spends his time betw ...

, José Morales, and

Pepón Osorio Pepón Osorio is a Puerto Rican artist. He uses different objects as well as video in his pieces to portray political and social issues in the Latino community. He was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico and studied at the Interamerican Universi ...

.Deborah Cullen, “Here and There: Six Artists from San Juan” in Here & There / Aquí y allá (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2001), 12.

References

External links

*
Review of Castellet's anthology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Novisimos Spanish literature Literary movements

History

Other uses of the term

References

Further reading

External links