Impersonality and metaphor in Hispanic avante garde poetry: Towards the writing of Cesar Vallejo's 'Trilce'

My dissertation examines the development of avant-garde aesthetics in Spain and Latin America between 1909 and 1924 in order to provide a more detailed historical context for Trilce by Cesar Vallejo (1922), arguably one of the most influential books of poetry of the twentieth century. In particular, I focus on the perception of the poetic self and its relationship to the use of metaphor by the avant-garde in Spain and Latin America between 1909 and 1924, and show that this perception was the result of a transatlantic dialogue on aesthetics which permeated Latin American poetry -- not only that written in cosmopolitan areas but also the poetry written by relatively isolated artists such as Cesar Vallejo.;Chapter 1 deals with perceptions of the poetic self from a historical perspective starting in 1909 with the reception of European Futurism in Spain and Latin America and culminating in the consolidation of avant-garde activity in the mid-twenties through landmarks of aesthetic change such as Vicente Huidobro's Creacionismo, Ultraismo, and the concept of "pure poetry" in Spain. I analyze conflicting demands in manifestos and essays of the period: on the one hand, the belief that the poet should "disappear into his text," and, on the other, protests about the impersonal nature of the poetic image and metaphor developed by the Hispanic avant-garde.;Chapter 2 focuses on the aesthetic status of the metaphor in Spanish-language poetry during the First World War. Here, I relate the profusion of the metaphor (for example, the development of "conceptista" imagery in Unamuno's El Cristo de Velazquez, the creation of Gomez de la Serna's greguerias, and the influence of cubist art on the poetry of Vicente Huidobro) to the debate, in the 1920s, on poetic subjectivity.;My third and final chapter studies successive versions of some of the poems in Trilce in order to show that Vallejo was aware of the avant-garde poetic debate relating to subjectivity. I argue that his departure from the principles of "dehumanization" of the poetic image made possible the poetic language of Trilce. By using a transatlantic perspective, my dissertation provides new insight into Vallejo's creative process.