Pound and the Novísimo Poets

This chapter includes essays (translated into English) by three acclaimed Novísimos poets, Antonio Colinas, Jaime Siles, and Luis Alberto de Cuenca, who discuss Ezra Pound’s impact on Spanish poetry in the 1970s. The Novísimos (“The Newest Ones”) was a movement of younger Spanish poets who discovered in Pound and T.S. Eliot mentors who would inspire them to transform the idiom of Spanish poetry from the grips of a stereotyped social consciousness. Colinas recounts his life-altering encounter with Pound in Venice in May 1971 and emphasizes the impact of the American poet’s silence as a poetics. A Classicist, Siles documents Pound’s impact on readers and poets in Spain, tracing his reception through translations and criticism, arguing how Pound guided poets to break loose from the dominant “social poetry” of the 1970s to cultivate an international, cosmopolitan orientation, also influenced by Baroque poetry. In his tribute, de Cuenca marks his discovery in the 1960s of Alfredo Rizzardi’s Italian translation of The Pisan Cantos as the transformative moment in his life as a poet, crediting Pound for liberating his voice and proclaiming him the Homer of our era.