In 1966 Pere (Pedro) Gimferrer won the Premio Nacional de Poesía of Spain for Arde el mar (The Sea Is Burning), published that year. The book became the principal model for poetic revolution in Spain during the late 1960s. As one of the leaders among the poets born after the Spanish Civil War, Gimferrer adopted a confrontational attitude and represented himself and his work as "una ruptura" (a breaking away) from the then-prevalent social poetry which had held sway since the 1950s and whose practitioners based aesthetic judgments on the social content of poetry rather than its structure.

The impact of Arde el mar was based on Gimferrer's claim that poetry should not be a realistic likeness of society, a biographical account, or a political diatribe as it had been for the social poets. At the beginning of his career Gimferrer wrote more poetry than theory, but...