The place of poetry within the cultural context in which it is produced and consumed is a particularly vexing question for contemporary poets and critics in Spain. How and why does poetry matter? What is its standing among the myriad discourses of postmodernity? The most readily available answer to this question, of course, is that the genre has lost whatever larger significance it once possessed: aside from the poets themselves and a few academic specialists, the familiar argument runs, poetry has scant resonance with the public. The emerging field of Hispanic Cultural Studies grants only minimal importance to poetry, a genre still heavily identified with the values that have shaped the literary canon: no contemporary poets are mentioned in Graham and Labanyi's Spanish Cultural Studies, except in Chris Perriam's survey of gay and lesbian culture. Within literary criticism, on the other hand, poetry is often regarded as a minor genre that began to wane in significance after the glory days of the generation of 1927. Even truly exceptional Spanish poets often appear to be minor figures when compared to even moderately successful novelists.

Even if we accept this pessimistic view, however, the specific claims made on behalf of poetry in contemporary Spain are highly revealing, providing clues about the status of literature as a whole. In the pages that follow I propose to examine the three principal arguments that have guided discussions of poetry in the past fifteen years, with an eye to answering the fundamental question of how poetry can still make a viable claim on the cultural imagination.