| Summary: | At the end of the nineteenth century there emerged a set of poetic principles that considered the existence of the poem beyond verse, feet, the accepted set of poetic forms and most importantly considered that the poem did not only belong to the realm of temporal arts, but that also could have a presence in space. At the beginnings of the twentieth century Modernism and the avant-garde carried on these principles of innovation. But by the end of the 1930s these efforts seem to reach an end. In Latin America in particular poetry by that time seemed to become more interested in social and historical issues than in experimentation and innovation of forms. However, there were some poets who never abandoned their innovative spirit. It was in the 1950s that a second wave of artists looked back to the spirit of those innovators of Modernism and the historical avant-garde movements in order to reconnect with that tradition. They saw that in their efforts there was a lot more at stake than the simple search for new forms; there was a revolution in the conception of poetry. In their work they found new conceptions about the organisation of the work of literature that could be indicative of a new poetic reality, one where poetry was no longer constrained by time based structures. Those implications reverberated to the very roots of the existence of the work of literature. The works analysed and interpreted in this work belong to that second wave of innovative artists that searched for the extension of the poem out of the realm of temporality and into the domain of space. That is, they wanted to make the poem present in the world. This thesis discusses the work of Argentinean poet Oliverio Girondo, Peruvian poet and artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and the Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poetry in relation to the issues and concepts of presence in their work. New ways of organising the work of literature prompted questions about its way of being. Traditionally the work of literature had been considered a temporal art but with the innovative conceptions of literature and art such consideration had to be put under question. It is not that literature had ceased to be a temporal art but that these authors integrated into their works spatial elements that transformed the way they are, and the way they are read. The works discussed in this thesis indicate their considerations about presence, the presence of the work of literature both as a concept within the works and as an issue to be addressed with the form of the work. This thesis shows the different forms in which these authors explored these issues. Their considerations about presence are ultimately a way to reconsider the 'place' and therefore presence of the work of literature in the simultaneously industrial and underdeveloped reality of Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century.
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