[1] Adamantly anti-fascist and surrealistic since its first issue, thirteen years after Rafael Trujillo assumed complete control of the country, the journal was one of the only publications that challenged and rejected the oppressive regime's ideology.
The editors of the journal Franklin Mieses Burgos, Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, Freddy Gatón Arce, Alberto Baeza Flores, and Eugenio Granell defined the movement in primarily surrealist terms and published many of the major modernists of the period.
LPS published a total of 21 editions (at 500 copies per edition), as well as 14 books of poetry, including some of the most important works of 20th century Dominican literature, such as Sin mundo ya y herido por el cielo (1944) and Clima de eternidad (1944), by Franklin Mieses Burgos; Víspera del sueño: Poemas para un atardecer (1944), by Aída Cartagena Portalatín; Vlía (1944), by Freddy Gatón Arce; Vendaval interior (1944), by Antonio Fernández Spencer, and Rosa de tierra (1944), by Rafael Américo Henríquez .
[3] In the February 1944 issue commemorating the Dominican Republic's first centennial, the only issue in which the editors buckle under political pressure to “salute” Trujillo, it proclaims the sorprendistas’ hope for “the creation of a world more beautiful, more free and more deep.” They published progressive writers from Argentina, Brazil, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, Guatemala, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Turkey, Uruguay, and the U.S. As one may imagine, they published a good number of the French surrealist and modernist writers, such as Breton, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud, and André Gide.
[3] LPS can rightly be understood as part of the broad European and Caribbean surrealist movement that, in an era of colonialism and fascism, found in art a refuge they hoped would become a home.
Beauty, for them, should shock or awaken the reader from an ideological stupor that accepts the way things are, the so-called “facts.” It is fitting, then, that in a letter to the editors of LPS, a Cuban poet, Emilio Ballagas, claimed that there could not be a better title for their journal to save them from “la poesía acostumbrada” or a customary and accommodationist poetry.
A characteristic feature of this poetic movement was the search within the individual, the exploration of the psyche and the soul, in order to explain and reflect in its figurative language the hardships of our society and the darkness of the world.