Guillermo de Torre

Guillermo de Torre Ballesteros (Madrid, 1900 – Buenos Aires, 14 January 1971) was a Spanish essayist, poet and literary critic, a Dadaist and member of the Generation of '27.

In 1923 he published a book of Dadaist poems, Helixes, which makes extensive use of calligrams, negative space, free verse, proparoxytones, and the mechanistic frenzy of Futurism.

Critics savaged the unorthodox work, which is noteworthy for including some of the first haikus written in Spanish: In El movimiento V. P., a roman à clef by Rafael Cansinos Asséns that appeared in 1921, De Torre was caricatured as "the youngest poet", speaking in neologisms and proparoxytones.

He continued to contribute to numerous Ultraist reviews, including Grecia (1919–1920), Cervantes (1919–1920), Ultra (1921–1922), Tableros (1922), Horizontes, Cosmópolis, and various European magazines such as Manomètre, of which he became an editor in 1925.

In 1925, he republished some of his writings from Cosmópolis under the title European Vanguard Literature, a work which enjoyed enormous success in Spain and Latin America ("For us," said Alejo Carpentier, "it was a kind of Bible") for its elucidation of such a vast and complex subject.

His work often reviewed the contributions of major literary figures, both in European Vanguard Literature (Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendras, Reverdy, Pound, Lee Masters, etc.)

He contributed both to newspapers (notably El Sol), and to cultural reviews, among them Revista de Occidente, La Vie des Lettres, and L'Esprit Nouveau.

He was a co-founder and literary adviser of the publishing house Losada, where he oversaw the compilation of the Complete Works of Lorca, and devoted space in his anthologies to Alberti, Bergamín, Cernuda, Faulkner, Kafka, Camus, Moravia, Malraux, and others.

A 2005 translation into Italian of his only collection of poems, Eliche, includes some biographical notes, Appunti su mio padre, by his son Miguel de Torre Borges published by Bibliotheca Aretina.

As well as appearing in Asséns's El Movimiento V. P., he is satirized by Gerardo Diego in one of his jinojepas, titled Guillaume de Tour, as "prince of the archipenic proparoxytone" (príncipe del esdrújulo archipénico).

Though de Torre's skill as a literary critic is comparable to that of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda, two other great poets of the 20th century, his intuitions were far from perfect.