creacionismo

An avant-garde movement which appeared almost simultaneously in France (Pierre Reverdy) and in the Spanish-speaking world (Vicente Huidobro) c.1916. Besides Huidobro, the main practitioners of creacionismo have been Gerardo Diego and Juan Larrea. The movement initiated a renewal of poetic vocabulary, and its enrichment by more daring juxtapositions of images and metaphors, arising out of the poet's refusal to reflect the divinely ordered real world, replacing it by complex magical visions of his/her own creation.

Do not confuse this literary movement with Creationism, a movement applying religion to Biology.

Creationism (in Spanish, creacionismo) was a literary movement, initiated by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro around 1912; In his own words:

"[A created poem] is a poem in which every constituent part, and the whole, show a new fact, independent of the external world, not bound to any other reality save its own, since it takes a place in the world as a singular phenomenon, separate and distinct from the other phenomena. And it is not beautiful because it commemorates something, it is not beautiful because it reminds us of things we have seen that were beautiful in turn, or because it describes beautiful things that may come to see. It creates extraordinary situations that can never exist in the objective world, that they will have to exist in the poem so that they exist somewhere."

Huidobro cites as inspiration some "admirable poems" of Tristan Tzara, though their "creation" is more formal than fundamental, and also some works by Francis Picabia, Georges Ribémont Dessaignes, Paul Eluard, and the Spanish poets Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego (which Huidobro calls "the two Spanish creationist poets").

The poet also claims that creationist poetry is by its own nature universal and universally translatable, "since the new facts remain identical in all tongues", while the other elements that prevail in non-creationist poetry, such as the rhyme and music of the words, vary among languages and cannot be easily translated, thus causing the poem to lose part of its essence.