Rare correspondents. The First World War of the Latin American modernists

Abstract

The strong shocks of the First World War had important aftershocks in Latin American culture, an omnipresent event —as an economic, political and media phenomenon— on which prominent modernist referents intervene and of which a large number of works remain practically forgotten by the canon. In this sense, we are interested in interrogating these literary ruins, poems and chronicles of the champions of New Art, in which a sensitive memory of the event survives, both aesthetic and anesthetic, which oscillates between nationalist propaganda and the denunciation of the horrors of war. Among other interventions, we note rare publications by Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Leopoldo Lugones, Roberto J. Payró, João do Rio, Juan José de Soiza Reilly, Emilio Kinkelin, Eduardo Carrasquilla Mallarino, Alejandro Sux, the García Calderón brothers, Ventura and José. In them, it can also be seen that its correspondents, rather than from a distant position, achieve a wide coverage of the different battlefronts and, even, are fully involved in the dissolving experience of modern warfare.