The Impact of Vicente Huidobro and Ramón Gómez de la Serna in the Spanish Avant-Garde: Visualization and Rhetorical Artifice Brian M. Phillips and Leticia Pérez Alonso Jackson State University Abstract: This paper discusses the visual rhetoric in the literary work of Vicente Huidobro and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. For Huidobro, images release imagination from restrictions that impede full creative potential. His creacionista poems merge the sensuous and intellective aspects of artistic productions to bring into being a new world, distancing them from our everyday reality and disarming our ability to understand. By contrast, Gómez de la Serna’s poetry places emphasis on intelligence and artifice, similar in style to Baltasar Gracián’s stylistic precepts of the Spanish Baroque literary movement, conceptismo. Keywords: Huidobro – Gómez de la Serna – Visualization – Witticism – Avant-Garde This essay examines the philosophical and aesthetic sense of mental and visual images in the compositions of Vicente Huidobro and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Huidobro and Gómez de la Serna reacted to the dominant modernista tradition of Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado by contributing to a renovation of the Spanish literary panorama. They attached importance to contrastive rhetorical devices as a means of exploiting the imaginative possibilities of the mind. The analysis of their use of eye-oriented rhetorical devices is significant since it provides insight into the philosophical implications of merging imagination and intelligence in the artistic activity of creation. For Huidobro, visual inspiration is the basis of his creacionista poetry, and thus he draws on image as an implement to convey freedom of mind at its maximum creative power. Nonetheless, Gómez de la Serna shows deference for metaphor to arrive at a poetic work characterized by wit and artifice, defining traits of his aesthetic theory and practice that harken back to the Spanish Baroque conceptistas such as Baltasar Gracián and Francisco de Quevedo. 1 Both authors use image and metaphor in their respective poetry, but it is 1 To be certain, we might consider Gracián to be the architect of conceptismo, defining this technique of producing writing with wit and metaphor through examples that he procures from the poets of antiquity and of his own time. Meanwhile, figures such as Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora provide poetic use of concepts, loosely defined in Emilio Blanco’s edition of Arte de ingenio, tratado de la T