Noucentisme

Its stylistical origins in the tradition started by Josep Torras i Bages, the Escola Mallorquina ("Majorcan School") led by the poets Joan Alcover and Miquel Costa i Llobera, the French Parnassian poetry and the Symbolists are obvious in most of the works produced in the period that spans from 1906 to approximately 1923.

Its most prominent adherent, Josep Carner, known by his epithet of "prince of the Catalan poets" and produced very elaborate, ornate poetry, reminiscent of the Baroque and still admired for his beautiful style and refined language.

In the following decades, though, the name of the movement has acquired a negative connotation of an excessively affected and artificial literature, just the opposite of Moderniste Joan Maragall's Romantic theory of "the living word", that is, spontaneity in creation.

Following the disagreements that took place among Catalan politicians, intellectuals and, most prominently, the working class of Barcelona (after the "disaster" of 1898 and the Rif War, especially after what has come to be known as Setmana Tràgica or Tragic Week in 1909), a segment of the population wished to disengage from Spain.

Now that they had been given the chance, intellectuals of Noucentisme (itself a vehicle of this conservative, Catholic Catalanism), led by Eugenio d'Ors, advocated a project of cultural intervention based on four principles: Imperialism, Arbitrarism, Civility, and Classicism.

Their concept of civility was rooted in a vision of an "ideal Catalonia" equalled to that of a Catalan polis ruled on the principles of culture, harmony, a democratic community life and order versus what they saw as the barbaric countryside.

Their project was never completely fulfilled, among other reasons because of disagreements between members of Noucentisme, anti-catalanist repression under the 1923–1930 dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, and the consequent rise to popularity and power of left-wing Catalan nationalist and independentist parties.