What the foregoing account of the work of some of the major figures in Spanish American poetry around and immediately after the mid-twentieth century seems to illustrate is that two different attitudes towards the production of poetry faced each other. One emerges directly from Paz and has been admirably studied by Thorpe Running in The Critical Poem (1996). The other connects with Neruda's Odas elementales, the view of poetic language espoused by Parra, and the practice of Cardenal, explored by Alemany Bay in Poesía coloquial hispanoamericana (1997). To see the difference in a nutshell, all that is necessary is to contrast Parra's 1958 essay “Poetas de la claridad” with Paz's “¿Qué nombra la poesía?” (1967) in Corriente alterna (1986b). At the extreme it is the difference between poetry which deliberately aims to adapt everyday referential language to its intentions (although this aim involves a number of tricky issues) and poetry which questions its own power over language. cardenal, for example, representing the first of these patterns, sums up his outlook in his interview with Alemany Bay, when he says: “dejé la hojarasca de metáforas y de adjetivación innecesaria, y creé una poesía más simple, más directa, más comunicativa, más clara y, por lo tanto, de mayor acceso al lector” (Alemany Bay, 1997, 197). On the other hand, Paz maintains, with the overstatement typical of manifestos that “la poesía moderna es inseparable de la crítica del lenguaje” and that in modern poetry external referents disappear and “la referencia de una palabra es otra palabra” (Paz, 1986b, 5).