A Sp. iconoclastic movement which first appeared in 1919 and had virtually disappeared by 1923. Spain’s answer to the European avant garde, U. proposed to merge advanced contemporary artistic tendencies. Jorge Luis Borges, who was in Spain in 1918, contributed to the origins of U. and carried its theories back to Buenos Aires in 1921. A founder and major theoretician of the group was the critic Guillermo de Torre, author of the Manifiesto Vertical . Rafael Cansinos-Assens, writer and intellectual figure of the postwar period, also had much to do with the promotion of the new aesthetics; and Ramón Gómez de la Serna too deserves his place as a significant antecedent. Both led important tertulias, the latter being the first to publish Ma-rinetti’s futurist manifesto in Sp. U. was a youthful revolt against outworn, secondhand modernism; it fiercely opposed routine and inertia. The Ultraists welcomed modern life and were nurtured by subversive postwar attitudes. Above all, they sought to rehabilitate the poem by daring imagery; their most characteristic poems were generally formed by a series of unconnected images, the more original the better. The poets of U. rejected narrative and anecdotal matter as well as sentimentality and rhetorical effusion, preferring to cultivate a humor and playfulness reminiscent of futurism. They advocated free verse and the elimination of rhyme and punctuation, and they strove to give visual form to their images by typographical techniques.
Creationism (q.v.) and U. were not only simultaneous movements but also very similar inform and intent, although the former was more restrictive in dogma and perhaps more rigorous or serious in its composition. The presence of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro in Madrid in 1918, after having been associated with Pierre Reverdy in Paris, planted seeds for this new adventure in irrationality. It has been said that U. had no great poet, nor did it produce lasting works; hence, to some extent it has been disregarded by literary historians. Yet many journals of the time published Ultraist poems by such known writers as Gerardo Diego and Juan Larrea. Diego’s Manual de espumas is usually cited as the best Ultraist book, while images modeled on the same aesthetic precepts can be found in a number of poets. Moreover, U. did promote creative freedom and experimentation concomitant with what was taking place in other countries, and it also opened up new avenues for the future. U. is a movement which must be taken into account if what followed in 20th-c. Sp. poetry is to be fully understood. Spanish . —M. de la Peña, El ultraísmo en España (1925); G. de Torre, Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (1925), Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia (1965); R. Cansinos-Assens, La nueva literatura (1927); G. Videla, El ultraísmo (1963); J. G. Manrique de Lara, Gerardo Diego (1970); M. Scri-maglo, Literatura argentina de vanguardia (1920–1930 ) (1974); Los vanguardismos en la Aménca Latina, ed. O. Collazos (1977); J. Cano Ballesta, Literatura y tecnología. Las letras españolas ante la revolución industrial: 1900–1933 (1981); W. Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914–1928 (1986).
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