A remedy against hispanic ankylosis: Salvador Rueda’s El Ritmo (1894)

Abstract

In the last two decades of the 19^th century, it was often held that poetry in Spanish had been lagging behind when compared to the poetry of other nations and languages. This was seen to reflect a more comprehensive cultural slowness in catching up with the global advancements in social and economic modernization. Spanish poetry was supposedly paralyzed by an excessive obedience to outdated authorities of its own literary tradition. In 1894, the Spanish poet Salvador Rueda published El ritmo, a polemical treatise on poetry proposing a rhythmical revolution as the antidote against verse stagnation. This paper aims to present and discuss 1) the discursive strategies used by Rueda to intervene in the course of the Hispanic culture; 2) the convergences and divergences of his intervention in relation to the current discourses of his time, particularly the poetics of the Hispanic-American Modernists, to whom literary historiography would soon attribute the real merit for revigorating poetry in Spanish by the turn of the 19 to the 20^th century.