Joan salvat papasseit: Between tradition and innovation, or the poetic form as an open-ended enquiry to society

A series of paradoxes shaped the development of the Avant-Garde in Catalonia, especially when considering Catalonia's reconstruction of its politics and culture within the Spanish state. With the purpose of articulating some of these paradoxes, this chapter shall analyze the ideas proposed by a foremost figure of the Catalan Avant-Garde, Joan Salvat-Papasseit (1894-1924) on the status, the form and the content of Avant- Garde poetry and the social milieu in which it develops, in his fictitious letter entitled "Fragments de lletres giredes" [Fragments of Mailed Letters]. This chapter is thus organized in three sections: I. Overture, in which I present a general mapping of Avant- Garde within modernism; II. Avant-Garde in Spain and the Catalan Specficity, a section that presents a general idea of the manifestation of Avant-Garde in Spain and fleshes out Catalan specificity; III. The Poetic Form: Between Tradition and Innovation, in which I present Salvat-Papasseit's ideas on the correspondence between form and content as well as tradition and innovation.