Although many contemporary scholars take for granted that modernismo was a syncretic literary movement, at the turn of the century
it was still unclear just what modernismo was. In an article published
as early as 1901, Jose Maria Nogues complained that ; modernismo had
become an omnibus term, likening it to a prism: all optical illusion with
no substance. Writers and critics were so baffled that in 1907, the editors of the journal El Nuevo Mercurio (“The New Mercury”) decided to
conduct a survey aimed at reining in a term as polysemic as modernismo.
Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, Miguel de Unamuno, Eduardo Chavarri,
Ramiro de Maeztu, Ernesto Bark, and Manuel Machado, among many
others, defined modernismo from very different perspectives and at times
in contradictory ways. There has never been complete agreement on the
characteristics, origins, or time period of modernismo.
