Romantic Poetry and Prose
Romantic Poetry
Narrative Poetry
Narrative poetry developed a kind of narrative linked to the medieval epic, romances, and legends of oral transmission. Frequent elements are ghostly and gloomy. The stories are located in places steeped in artistic tradition.
Lyric Poetry
There were two periods during the nineteenth century: In the first half of this century, José de Espronceda cultivated a lyric characterized by rhetorical emphasis and patriotic and social themes. The development of lyric poetry continued in the second half of the century with the work of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro, an intimista literature. It maintains the pessimistic view and conception of love as a source of pain and disappointment. The patriotic ambience is substituted by lugubrious melancholy, and it becomes interiority. Nature sometimes contrasts with the mood of the lyrical and other times identifies with it. The poetry of this second phase arises in a cultural climate of Germanic mark.
Bécquer’s Poetry
Bécquer is an intimate and thoughtful poet. His poetry is the culmination of the internalization process characteristic of Romanticism. His poetry expresses feelings and reflections caused by life experience; they are not autobiographical.
Textual History of Rimas
Sixty-nine short poems, the author reproduced the texts by heart, in a volume entitled The Book of Sparrows. After the poet’s death, an edition of the Rimas was prepared in which the poems appeared in four groups:
- First group: Includes rhymes I to XI, corresponding to reflection poems about poetry and its creation.
- Second group: Collects the rhymes XII to XXIX, referring to love.
- Third group: Meets rhymes XXX to LI, which deals with issues like disappointment and disillusionment.
- Fourth group: Includes rhymes LII to LXXVI, with reflections on loneliness and death.
Poetic Topics
Poetry and Poetic Creation
There is poetry in life itself; it is inherent in the world around us. Poetry is feeling that identifies with the feminine. The female subject represents what we seek but cannot achieve.
Love, Broken Heart, and Disappointment
Love, related to poetry, nature, and God, is the central theme of the Rimas. It is an unattainable ideal, and the loved one, an inaccessible, “intangible” being. Some poems express an optimistic feeling, but most transmit the failure of the experience of love and disappointment. The disappointment is expressed through irony, cruelty, and sarcasm, and in others, with anguish and despair.
Loneliness and Death
Loneliness is a feeling of being, and for the romantic lyrical, nature can be a refuge. The individual feels alone in the vastness of the world and does not find answers to vital questions. Loneliness is intensified against the enigma of death and is symbolized in the abandoned tomb.
Dream and Nature
Reality is perceived as an integration of the rational and the dream, and there is a merger between the world and dream. Dreams allow the expression of the spirit and imagination. Nature is sometimes an impassive and indifferent element. In many of the poems, it is an expression of the feelings of the lyrical, is presented in constant movement, and images related to light and air are of particular importance.
Style
Spoken Forms
Much of the Rimas is structured from the explicit or implicit presence of the issuer that appeals to the receiver. In most of the poems, dialogue does not occur because the communication context is often missing. Among the subjects can be loving union, disjunction, or the merger of aspirations. The relationship between you and me can achieve, in the Rimas, a symbolic level, in which you / woman is identified with poetry, and the self / man, with the poet.
Bimembraciones and Parallels
The rhythm is often evident in the presence of bimembraciones, established with different kinds of words or phrases. These bimembraciones join parallelism, and both resources shape the structure of the poem, which is organized in groups dominated by antithesis.
Metric
Assonance predominates, along with the mixture of heroic verse and seven-syllable verses. Bécquer also cultivates traditional forms. Sometimes he uses the broken-foot verse or a combination of lines with an unequal number of syllables.
Romantic Prose
The Historical Novel
The interest in the past made a type of historical novel flourish in which literary truth mattered more than the authenticity of the events. Two types were cultivated: one locates the action in the past, and the other is contemporary novels of manners, which reflect conflicts and current situations.
Novels of Manners
Costumbrismo developed linked to journalism. The literary manifestation of costumbrismo, the customs box, reflected, through newspaper articles, aspects and characters of the time. The middle class was the preferred social sector, with descriptions of scenes and types: shops, pilgrimages, clothing, etc.
The Serial
Initially, this name was given to the articles printed in small print at the bottom of newspaper pages. The serial novel was released both in newspapers and in separate editions by installments. The characters and topics often developed emotional conflicts.