Ultraism

Ultraism was a literary movement begun in Spain in 1918, following the creationist model of Vicente Huidobro, and opposed to modernism and novecentismo, which had dominated poetry in the Spanish language since the end of the 19th century. In the shadow of these American stimuli, the ultraists met at the tertulia of the Café Colonial in Madrid, presided over by Rafael Cansinos Assens and enlivened by Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Pedro Garfias, Ernesto López-Parra, Pedro Iglesias Caballero, José María Quiroga Plá and the Rivas Panedas brothers, in a circle that would gradually widen and that would come to attract the attention of a young Jorge Luis Borges, of pupils such as Rogelio Buendía, Isaac del Vando Villar, Eugenio Montes and Gerardo Diego, and of feminist activists such as Lucía Sánchez Saornil.

The novecentista norms that culminated in Rubén Darío may be considered abolished.

— «Un manifiesto literario - ULTRA»

Origin and manifestos

Cansinos Assens, organizer of the Madrid ultraist tertulia

Cover by Rafael Barradas for the magazine Vltra, 1 December 1921

Cover of the magazine Hélices by Rafael Barradas, 1923

The initial ultraist circle acknowledged the sponsorship of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro and the Frenchmen Mallarmé and Apollinaire. And although they do not mention it, its contemporaneity with the «Dada» movement created in Zürich by Tristan Tzara should be noted. Max Aub summarizes the avant-garde theses of the ultraists as their «desire to set themselves apart from the masses, carrying to its natural end what had been begun by the “rare ones” of the end of the 19th century. Literature was ‘of’ and ‘for’ initiates». These theses were in some way heirs of Futurism, although limited to the literary and above all to the poetic. For more than a decade its activity and creative ideology were reflected in the magazines Cervantes (1919-1920), Grecia (Seville-Madrid), Vltra (1919-1920) in Oviedo and Vltra (1921-1922) in Madrid, Horizonte (Madrid, 1922-1923) and, less strongly, in Alfar (La Coruña), Reflector (Madrid, 1920) or Ronsel (Vigo). Mention must also be made of Cosmópolis (1919-1922), which, although not ultraist, published the critical articles and essays on avant-garde literature of Cansinos Assens, Guillermo de Torre or Borges. Other short-lived magazines that served as a closing for an ultraism that would meet its decline, well into the 1920s, are Perseo (1919), Tableros (1921-1922) or Revista de Casa de América de Galicia (1921-1927).

Throughout its existence, the movement gave birth to several and varied manifestos. The first was published in the January 1919 issue of the magazine Cervantes. Other later but important ultraist manifestos were the one drafted by Guillermo de Torre in Madrid, in November 1920, or the one written by Borges and published in the magazine Vltra, in Madrid, on 20 May 1921,

It so happened that between two of the European countries farthest from Europe, at a moment of the blossoming of the nationalist avant-gardes, such as Poland with Formism, which flourished between 1917 and 1922, and Spain with ultraism, ideas and materials came to be exchanged.

Borges and Vltra

A young Jorge Luis Borges, who settled with his sister Norah Borges in the Madrid of 1919, soon became involved in the atmosphere of the tertulias that governed the cultural life of the capital of Spain. Finally, his preferences fell on the side of the learned Hebraist Cansinos Assens; the fruit of this and of his friendship with the ultraist, painter and haiku enthusiast Jacobo Sureda, was the manifesto signed by both together with Juan Alomar and Fortunio Bonanova, published in 1920 in the magazine Baleares. This pamphlet would be the precedent for the ultraist activities in Argentina reflected in Prisma (1921-1922) and Proa (1922-1923, first period). A period that Borges himself summarized in his article published in 1921 in the magazine Nosotros, of Buenos Aires, and which can be summed up in the following program:

1. Use of metaphor.
2. Striking out of intermediary phrases, connectives and useless adjectives.
3. Abolition of «ornamental junk», confessionalism, circumstantiation, preaching and contrived nebulousness.
4. Synthesis of two or more images into one, which thereby broadens its power of suggestion.
5. Shocking, illogical images and metaphors, in which the world of cinema, sport and technical progress stand out: «Engines sound better than hendecasyllables» (Guillermo de Torre).
6. A tendency to establish a new typographical arrangement of the words of the poem, thereby seeking to make visible a fusion of the visual arts and poetry.
7. Neologisms, technical terms and proparoxytone words.
8. Elimination of rhyme.
9. Songs to objects of the modern world (the automobile, the light bulb…).

In the visual arts

The aesthetic and visual translation of ultraism was poured into the covers and illustrations of the magazines that spread the movement, with artists such as:

• Eva Aggerholm
• Rafael Barradas
• Norah Borges
• Daniel Vázquez Díaz

General bibliography

• Torre, Guillermo de, Literaturas europeas de vanguardia. Caro Raggio. Madrid. 1925
• Ibarra, Néstor. La nueva poesía argentina. Ensayo crítico sobre el ultraismo (1921-1929). Buenos Aires. 1930
• Videla, Gloria. El ultraísmo. Estudios sobre movimientos poéticos de vanguardia en España. Editorial Gredos. Madrid. 1963
• Bonet, Juan Manuel. Catalog of the exhibition "Ultraísmo". IVAM. Valencia. 1996
• Lorenzo Alcalá, May, "Los mosqueteros del ultraismo argentino", in Todo es Historia no. 480. Buenos Aires, June 2007.
• Borges, Jorge Luis, "Anatomía de mi Ultra", Ultra, Madrid, year 1, no. 11, 20 May 1921.
• "Ultraísmo", Nosotros, Buenos Aires, year 15, vol. 39, no. 15, December 1921.

See also

• Ultraist Manifesto