THE ELUSIVE COMMUNITY. SPANISH POETRY OF THE TRANSITION IN THE CRISIS OF HUMANISM

Spanish poetry of the Transition period is caught in an aporia: the need to imagine a new form of political community and the difficulty that the crisis of humanist culture poses to this imagination. On one hand, the opening of democracy called upon poetry to forge the images, forms, and words of a new political community. The poetic experience, however, suffers from the death of humanism and, with it, the collapse of culture as a symbolic universe capable of harmonizing the ideas, emotions, and actions of individuals and social groups. History demanded the words and shared imaginaries that could enable social dialogue, yet this demand addressed a genre bankrupt since the Second World War, relegated to the margins of late capitalist society, and haunted by its conspicuous or demoralizing ties to barbarism. Perhaps caught in the vice between postmodernity and the Spanish Transition of the era, this poetry shines most when it approaches its own limits. Indeed, community was an elusive horizon, the most intimate utopia of these poetic ideologies. Poetry tends toward it, formulates it as a desire, but this desire remains unfulfilled. It is in political imagination that the need which calls to this poetry, the desire that drives it, and the yearnings and utopias that remain just beyond the reach of words become most apparent.

Sergio Navarro (Marbella, 1992) is a Professor of Literature at the University of Granada. He has worked and conducted research at the universities of Navarra, Cambridge, Bordeaux, and Freiburg. As a scholar, he has focused primarily on 20th- and 21st-century Spanish and Latin American poetry, and his essays have appeared in national and international journals. As a poet, he has published Historia del tacto (José Hierro Poetry Collection, 2022), Una imagen imposible (RNE Poetry Prize, Pre-Textos, 2018), and La lucha por el vuelo (Adonáis Poetry Prize, Adonáis, 2017). He was also a resident fellow of the Antonio Gala Foundation for Young Creators, as part of its fifteenth cohort.