La Politica (1968) de Jose Luis Castillejo frente a la tradicion de la poesia social

Over the last years, Jose Luis Castillejo's work has sprung growing critical atten-tion. However, critical studies have not analysed his work in relation to late-francoist Spanish literature. In this article, I contrast Castilllejo's La Politica (1968) with the tradition of Spanish social poetry. Rejecting the lyricism that characterizes social poetry, Castillejo's work makes use of the impersonal procedure of appropriation to mark its connection with politics and attempts to build a form of non-oppositional protest. Rejecting the lyrical interference of the ego, Castillejo's La Politica (1968) offers a testimony but also a critical view of late-Francoist Spain. Following Max F. Jensen's proposal in his 2019 article on experimental poetry, this article questions the supposed political neutrality of experimental poetry, introduces La Politica into discussions of the Spanish poetic field and tries to widen the concept of social poetry.