Degrees of freedom in Vicente Huidobro's poem Altazor.

Abstract

The article examines the different degrees of creative freedom present in Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor (1931), showing how the poet experiments with language at several levels—syntactic, lexical, morphological and phonological—to expand the expressive possibilities of Spanish and explore its structural limits. Using a descriptive linguistic approach, the authors first analyze the level of the syntagm, where the poem retains narrative structures borrowed from genres such as the picaresque, though revitalized through innovative and unexpected imagery. At the lexical level, Huidobro constructs autonomous, dreamlike worlds through semantically impossible combinations that challenge referential logic. At the morphological level, the study highlights the systematic invention of words through productive mechanisms of Spanish—such as derivation and compounding—illustrated by terms like monotémpora, auricida, gondoleando, and the numerous variations of golondrina, all built through analogical and concordant patterns. Finally, at the phonological level, the poem undergoes a progressive breakdown of meaning, reducing words to sound units that produce musical and visual effects, culminating in the seventh canto with nearly pure phonetic sequences. The article argues that Altazor operates as a linguistic laboratory in which poetic freedom ranges from near-limitless creativity to self-imposed morphological and semantic constraints, thereby revealing the generative potential of language.