The presence of these young people is manifested in a discreet way, as they operate in a regime not of rupture with the past, but of continuity; they do not constitute a group or issue any proclamations, programs or controversies; on the contrary, not having a dominant or exclusive aesthetic, they acquire a character of openness and plurality: the ” theoretical ” hour of poetry has set, and the ” lyrical ” hour has struck. Even if these poets present a great variety of cultural and poetic origins and choices, it is already possible to trace, in the most gifted, some lines of preference: the classical world, pure poetry (minimalist) and the sensibility of rock. The first trend can be attributed to some poets who manage to use classical sources with rigorous results, both on the metric and on the poetic level. The most mature and significant texts are those of F. Benítez Reyes (b. 1960), Paraíso manuscrito (1982) and Los vanos mundos (1985); by J. Llamazares (b. 1955), La lentitud de los bueyes (1979) and Memoria de la nieve (1985); by J. Gutiérrez (b. 1955), El don de la derrota (1981); by M. Más, La hora transparente (1985). The other line of research moves from the postulates of pure poetry, with strong outcomes and mental modulations. They are poets who try to express the astonishment of the idea or feeling with the radical essentiality of linguistic resources, to the point of sometimes touching the expressive concentration of minimalism. Among these, the most determined in exploring the secret and intimate reasons for their poetry are JM Castillo Navarro (b. 1928: Selva, 1983), J. Riechmann (b. 1962: Diálogo de la herida, 1985); I. Paesa (El oscuro, 1983). Finally, there are other young people who definitely feel the influence of the sensibility of rock, understood not only as music but as an experience of life and culture, which are accompanied by echoes ofAmerican beat generation and, in some cases, with expressionist or surrealist ancestry: and we will cite L. García Montero (b. 1958) for El jardín extranjero (1982) and Egloga de los rascacielos (1984); B. Andreu (b. 1959) for De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall (1981-83) and Báculo de babel (1983); A. Muñóz Petisme (b.1959) for Cosmética y terror (1984) and El Océano de las Escrituras (1986). The peculiarity of this trend lies not in the use of grafts or quotations (also present in other poets, especially in the “ novissimi ”), but in the poetic writing that is, so to speak, saturated by the vision of the world that the dimension of life and ” modern ” experience it brings with it.

According to nexticle, these young poets constitute a ” normal ” generation, as they are open to travel and cultural adventure, which produces a wealth of aesthetic and poetic mixes, eclectically mobile variants from one book to another and often within the same book. Their extreme aesthetic availability coexists with the refusal of any exclusivism, even if temptations and preferences are manifested in them. Turning their backs on the typical closures of the avant-garde, they offer themselves, with a movement of intense desire, to the availability of poetic making of every century. They are not opposed, in principle, to anything: they only try to save and impose the individuality of the writer, tense in his attempt to search (and dominate, in the most successful cases) the literary diachrony;

In this sense, it is a generation that has an oblique relationship with the present, both emotional and contradictory. She lives immersed in the surrounding environment and tends to show a different daily life, without shame and without veiling – music, sex, drugs, youth myths and rites, the rediscovery of the body, etc. -, trying to render them with the syncopated and segmented language of audiovisuals, but, at the same time, mixing them with the most rigorous literary tradition, full of refined images and creative transparency. The extreme rupture of the literary coexists with the greatest respect for tradition and the greatest mimesis of literature. Naturally, this way of making poetry is exposed to risks and dangers, which are glimpsed in young people with less personality; the relationship with tradition and with the great poetry of the past can be life-giving, but it can also lead to sterile mimicry, despite the apparent good workmanship of the texts, up to the concealment or lack of formation of a personal voice, for which one it ends up falling into the most epigonal traditionalism. The dangers are even greater on the line of pure poetry, as it is more exposed to intellectualistic formalism, poor in authentic results, under the guise of a cryptic linguistic essentiality.

For some critics, the modalities of presence of these young poets, the breadth of their choices, the willingness to get in touch with the literary diachrony, could lead us to suppose that we are dealing with a generation of transition towards “ strong ” outcomes of the near future. But according to others, the same cultural openness and the desire for an intense relationship with tradition can constitute the decisive foundation for nourishing a poetry that is still immature, but less dogmatic and more reflective, and above all open to mature and significant developments. In this sense, the generation of poets of the early Eighties, starting from evolutionary and continuative lines of certain experiences of the previous decade, could develop a more rigorous and enlightened poetic approach.