This study reverses the widespread notion that Rodriguez, a major voice in contemporary Spanish poetry, is a naive writer by interpreting his poetry as a sustained meditation on the problem of poetic language.

"Each of these works is meticulously structured around a two-poem section that gives each its unique configuration and character. Yet, at the same time, each poem maintains its individual independence and singular integrity."--BOOK JACKET. "In Breaking New Ground, W. Michael Mudrovic presents a comprehensive reading and detailed analysis of Rodriguez's work to date, including Casi una leyenda."--BOOK JACKET.

In Wisdom Through Poetry the author writes about his experiences, beliefs and feelings. He uses simple language to speak of love, pain, joy and conflicts that he has experienced over the years to invoke a feeling of love for humanity, community and especially poetry. He hopes to instill in the reader a sense of appreciation of one's own experiences so that they can act in such a way that will enable them to achieve peace and happiness.

This collection offers for the first time criticism, biographical essays, analysis, translation studies, and reminiscences of Ezra Pound’s extensive interaction with Spain and Spanish culture, from his earliest visits to Spain in 1902 and 1906 and his study of significant Spanish writers to the dedication of the first monument erected anywhere to Pound in the small Spanish village of Medinaceli in 1973. Divided into two sections, Part One: “ON EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD” includes a general introduction on Pound’s lifelong involvement with Spain, together with chapters on Pound’s study of classical Spanish literature, the Spanish dimension in The Cantos, Pound’s contemporary Spanish connections, and his legacy in contemporary Spanish letters. Part Two: “EZRA POUND AND THE SPANISH WORLD: A READER,” then gathers for the first time Pound’s own writings (postcards, letters, and essays) concerning Spain and Spanish writers, as well as his correspondence with Spanish poets Miguel de Unamuno and Juan Ramón Jiménez and with José Vázquez Amaral, the first Spanish translator of The Cantos in its entirety. The volume includes reminiscences by Spanish Novísimos poets, Antonio Colinas and Jaime Siles, written explicitly for this collection. Besides providing a thorough exploration into Pound’s engagement with Spain, this volume pays homage to Pound’s considerable influence on Spanish culture.

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000 addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambitiousness of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Jonathan Mayhew first offers a critical analysis of the called 'poetry of experience' of Luis García Montero, a tendency that is based on the supposed obsolescence of the modernist poetics of the first half of the century. While the 'poetry of experience' presents itself as a progressive attempt to 'normalise' poetry, to make it accessible to the common reader, Mayhew views it as a reactionary move that ultimately reduces poetry to the status of a minor genre. The author then turns his attention to the poetry of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, whose poetry embodies the continuation of modernism, and to the work of younger women poets of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout this controversial and provocative book, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the larger culture and society. It turns out that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics is still highly relevant even in an age in which more cynical views of literature seem prevalent. Ultimately, Mayhew writes as an advocate for the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age.