ABSTRACT

In 1930 the debts were less visible as more recent Spanish American versions of the European avant-garde competed for attention. Founded in Madrid, ultraismo was endorsed by Vicente Huidobro who travelled to the Spanish capital in 1918 and launched a magazine titled Ultra. With roots in creacionismo, Futurism and Dada, ultraismo was taken to Argentina by a young Jorge Luis Borges who helped to distribute a poster-manifesto, Prisma, around the streets of Buenos Aires in December 1921. While removed from the direct impact the First World War in Europe, Mexicans suffered their own bloody decade of civil conflict from 1910 to 1920. Valery effectively prefaces The Waste Land with a meditation on the artistic preoccupations that the Contemporaneos found in T. S. Eliot. The association of Eliot and Valery is not an unnatural one. Eliot corresponded with the French poet and kept a picture of him on the wall of his office at Faber.