Ultraismo

Ultraismo was a Spanish-language avant-garde poetry movement launched in Madrid in 1918 as a direct reaction against the ornate, refined style of the preceding Modernismo movement, seeking instead a stripped-down poetry built on vivid, often startling metaphor and purged of decorative adjectives, sentimental commentary and connecting rhetoric. Its central figures, who gathered at Madrid's Cafe Colonial, included Rafael Cansinos Assens, an early mentor to the movement, Guillermo de Torre, who wrote its clearest theoretical statements, the poet Gerardo Diego, and the young Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, who encountered the movement while living in Spain and carried its aesthetic back to Buenos Aires, where it shaped the early Argentine avant-garde. Drawing eclectically on contemporary European movements including Italian Futurism, French Cubism and early Dada, Ultraismo's own organized activity was brief, with its journal Ultra ceasing publication in 1922, but its emphasis on the metaphor as poetry's essential unit continued to shape Borges's own poetic practice through the 1920s and left a lasting mark on Spanish-language avant-garde poetics on both sides of the Atlantic.