Abstract:

Abstract “La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro” is the title of a poem included in Cantos iberos (1955), by Gabriel Celaya, but also one of the most prominent common places in postwar Spanish poetry. This paper focuses on the persistence of Celaya’s motto in the authors emerged in the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Three main attitudes towards Celaya’s message are distinguished in this period: the adaptation of the idea of social transformation to the disenchanted perspective of contemporary commitment; the conversion of Celaya’s dictum into a devitalized slogan, not far from commercial rhetoric; or the resignification of the old social claims in a new context of civic dissatisfaction.

Keywords: