Debating the function of language in poetry: Meta-textual musings in the Spanish 50s generation

Even from this brief excursus into the meta-textual musings of the poets that start publishing in the 50s in Spain, the paramount importance they give to the linguistic aspects of the lyrical process should be evident. It actually seems that their poetry can only come about after they’ve succeeded in pin-pointing the connection between a theory of language and their own creative impulses. Yet it’s equally important to keep in mind that these poets’ thoughts were rooted in a philosophical tradition, rather than in a concrete linguistics, but also that some of the arguments put forth in the knowledge-communication debate could be said to be less than firmly rooted ontologically. Witness the concern with whether or not it’s possible to obtain a knowledge of ‘reality’ by means of the creative process and whether or not it’s possible for poetic discourse to ever really represent existential experience. In spite of all this, however, the attraction the concrete moment of the creation of verbal art had for the Generación del 50, as well as their fascination with questions such as poetic reception and social function, and thus also with the reader, makes them essential for any understanding of the evolution of Spanish literary language. As I’ve already intimated, these poets were far from having any desire to substitute the linguists at their job, but their meta-poetic reflections and their Poetics contained, and in part I think still do, an implicit admonishment of the various schools of linguistics. What they ask is that the linguists give, or at least attempt to give, some answers, theoretical to the degree they want but systematic, to the many questions posed by poetic creation, the raw material of which is always, after all, language.