Tradition, avant-garde and poetics in Madrigal al billete de tranvía by Rafael Alberti

Abstract

The dialogical relation that the Spanish Vanguard settled with tradition —a usual phenomenon also in Latinamerica— has given place to parceled interpretations of the art and literature of the early XXth century, and, specially, of the poetry of the so-called «Generación del 27». During the last two decades, critical approaches has shown that the alliance between the past and «the new» is far from being an obstacle that condemns the Spanish «ismos» to be seen as inauthentic ones, and therefore to be accused of not having the transformative impulse that characterized the artistic projects of the early modernized European countries. Based on the recent works that have reviewed these premises (Soria, Olmedo, Geist, Bosi, García Montero, Wilson...), the purpose of this article is to analyze the well known (and many times cited) Rafael Alberti’s poem «Madrigal al billete de tranvía», with the aim to explore, in a creative text, the manifestations of a vanguardist aesthetic that re-elaborated the lyric models inherited from the tradition. In addition to this, this article aims to show that, below the hermeticism of the «neo-Gongorian» madrigal discourse, lies the brief manifesto of a poetics whose decipherment enriches the interpretations of Alberti’s works during the 20s.