Late Romanticism in Spanish Literature: Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro
Late Romanticism: Mid-19th Century
In the second half of the 19th century, there were great poets who represented a continuation and evolution of Romanticism.
Late Romanticism: Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro
Authors such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda or Carolina Coronado eliminated the exaggerated rhetoric and shaped a new lyrical expression fully based on naturalness and balance of images, thoughts, and emotion. In the same metric as other romantics, they combined various meters and stanzas (polymetry).
Bécquer: Life and Works
Gustavo Adolfo Domínguez Bastida (Seville, 1836 – Madrid, 1870), known as Bécquer, came from a Flemish family established by their ancestors in Seville. Orphaned at a young age, he moved to Madrid in 1854, where he lived in economic hardship as a journalist. He married Casta Esteban in 1861, had two children, and separated in 1868. From 1864 until the revolution of 1868, he worked as a censor of novels. Since he was young, he had a pulmonary illness. He died in 1870, and his work was published and succeeded in 1871.
*Rhymes*
- I-XI: Reflection on poetry
- XII-XXIX: Love, illusions, beauty
- XXX-LI: Heartbreak
- LII-LXXVI: Pain, anxiety, loneliness
Metric Style and *Rhymes*
Bécquer’s poetry signifies a purification of the rhetoric and the excessive sentimental exaggeration of the first Romantic period. He employed numerous figures of speech (epithets, parallelism, antithesis, metaphor). The main quality of his style is naturalness: his words reach the reader not by the sound pattern or the grandiloquent lexicon but by the fineness of expression and the intensity of sincerity in his feelings. In his style, the Romantic evocation of nature is very important: he admires the grandeur and energy of the natural world (colossal) and presents a vision of spiritualized nature that reflects the feelings of the poet. He frequently employs volatile or vague materials to reflect dreams or imaginations, where the metric is dominated by composite verses of seven and eleven syllables, among others, and assonant rhymes.
Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885)
Born in Santiago de Compostela, Rosalía de Castro came from a lower noble family. In 1858, she married the Galician intellectual Manuel Murguía. The publication of *Cantares Gallegos* (*Galician Songs*) occurred in 1863. Of melancholy temperament, her fragile health and life’s setbacks (she lost two children) impregnated her poems with pain and dissatisfaction in life. She died at 48 years old.
Work
She wrote three books of poetry: *Cantares Gallegos* (1863), a book of exaltation of the Galician land, *Follas Novas*, and *En las Orillas del Sar*. Her style is similar to Bécquer’s: simple and anti-rhetorical language, assonance rhyme, and a variety of verses and combinations of meters of 14, 16, and 18 verses.
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