Abstract
The essay sees Spanish-American Modernism as a version of the "universal crisis" of the end of the 19th century, looking for the characteristics which will prove influential throughout the 20th century. In the search for authenticity, both on the level of cultural identity and that of the radicalization of poetic expression, surprising affinities between distant countries emerge, as, for example, in the case of the aesthetic conception of José Martí and the Czech essayist F.
X. Šalda.